New feed can be found at http://the-inbetween.com/feed/. Or you can get an amalgamated feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/n0wak. Also, don't forget my del.icio.us link feed. Thank you. That is all.

All I want is for my html to remain exactly the same as it is now. Why is this so hard to do? (A rhetorical question since comments are dead until the transition is complete. I was tired of getting a hundred comments about ringtones and penis enlargers and poker. PROTIP: ban the entire .info top level domain to vastly improve your spam denialability!)

Geometry Wars. A threshold has been crossed. Over the course of a day or two, I jumped from "500,000 points is a big time fluke" to "500,000 points is an average score." My new 840k+ high score has put me in second place on my friends list. That's nowhere near the overall leader, but I don't care. I just want to be number one on my friends list and that's what keeps me playing. To me, being able to have a leaderboard amongst only your friends is one of the best features of XBox Live. It fosters more competition.

The one thing that might be relevant to this new high score is that when I achieved it, Aphex Twin was playing in the background. I don't listen to AFX that often so this might not be a coincidence. The music fits the game.

Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting. Before this came out, I expected three things that I would forgive so long as the arcade port was solid.

1. XBox controller wouldn't be so great for this.
2. There would be lag online, as with every other 2D fighter I've ever touched.
3. I would know the moves and the characters, but I would be terribly rusty.

They were all true. Sort of. The first two were there but weren't as terrible as I expected and the third was true but, well, this game is hard. A lot harder than I ever remember it being.

1. The d-pad isn't horrible. Right now, it might seem a lot worse than it is because it is incredibly hot and humid so the moisture tends to make my finger slip a bit on the d-pad (crosses are so much better for this. Damn you Nintendo patent!) I try to go for a fireball and instead I jump forward and into the waiting fists of the opponent. Also, because this d-pad is slightly touchy with the diagonals I'm having an inconsistent time pulling off the "charge" moves. This is frustrating and it doesn't help make the game any less difficult.
2. The lag isn't bad, for the most part. I've had the occassional laggy slowdown when playing a quick match, but when playing with friends or playing a ranked game (you can choose the game based on ping and I always go for the green ones), everything has performed smoothly. A little bit of latency might screw up your timing, but unless you are hardcore frame counting it won't be much of an issue.
3. While this was somewhat true, I managed to get back to form rather quick. That, however, didn't prevent me from getting my ass handed to me by the computer. Even at the default difficulty, this game is hard. Really hard. Perhaps it's because I was weaned on the SNES version rather than the arcade game, but I really don't remember it ever being this difficult. Playing against human opponents, though, is far more rewarding (and less cheap--unless you run into one of those lame E.Honda thousand punch losers.)

Galaga. Honestly, I don't even know why I bothered. Galaga is available in twenty different forms already, so why spend the money on yet another edition? Well, leaderboards, I guess; and achievement points (thankfully they were easy here). But mostly because I am a game whore.

However, I swear that I will not buy Pac-Man this week. Really. I have to draw the line somewhere.

Ever since I bought the 360, about two months ago, it has been the exclusive¹ game system in my household. I've been playing a number of games, trying out demos, purchasing Arcade titles, climbing up my friends' list leader boards (I will be number one in Geometry Wars² one day!) and amassing achievement points³. The last one has proved to be a particularly genius move by Microsoft. I find that the achievement points fuel my competitive spirit and indirectly get me to play games a little bit more (and maybe even differently) than I normally would. It also gets me playing some of the more mediocre games that I'd normally overlook otherwise (as much as I do like hockey, I hate sports games -- but the achievement points in NHL 2K6 were exceedingly easy to get!⁴).

Maybe that is one of the reasons why, despite liking the system, I'm rather underwhelmed by the software so far. There are a few good games, but the 360 library is still missing the really great⁵ titles that it sorely needs in anticipation of the upcoming Playstation 3 and Wii. Things will likely change once we get past the dry season (summer), but by then the 360 will finally have competition. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out⁶.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Though, really, this can also be attributed to the fact that this is the aforementioned dry season and none of the other consoles have anything coming out at the moment. The novelty of the 360 trumps the other ho-hum releases.
2. Just had my best game yet, gaining two new achievements (first time in a long time) and breaking the 700k point mark. I will get 1 million.
3. It's interesting to note that my achievement points seem to surge almost exclusively on Fridays and Saturdays.

4. This is the biggest problem with the achievement points -- consistency. Some games they're rediculously easy, others have it impossibly hard.
5. No, Oblivion does not do it for me.
6. if I can, I'm getting a Wii. I have no interest in getting a Playstation 3 at or even near launch.

The commercial would start in a bedroom showing a wife, or possibly a girlfriend in restless sleep, when all of a sudden you could hear some random shouting of excitement. The woman would wake up, and look at the empty spot in the bed right next to her, and you can see frustration on her face. She gets up, and proceeds to walk to the living room in her dark house. You can hear the TV volume increasing as she gets closer. When she makes it there, she sees her husband/boyfriendsitting on the couch having a blast while playing his Xbox 360. She turns the console off in frustrationthat he has stayed up for most of the night playing his Xbox 360, and left her to sleep all by herself. The husband/boyfriend's face looks sad as he is being dragged off the couch, and back to the bedroom, when he has a brilliant idea. They walk back into the living room where he picks up another controller and hands it to her with confidence. The commercial ends showing the two of them playing their Xbox 360 together. This commercial could be aimed at females, to show them that video games and the Xbox 360 are not just for guys.

TOTALLY.

Speaking of which, I noticed this on the XBox site:

FPO = For Placement Only

Ooops! You web team's QA is showing.

To be honest, I was very hesitant about getting a Sony. Their brand identity with personal electronics is to me like Firestone is to tires. In other words, when I get a Sony I half expect it to turn into a crashing wreck.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons why I opted for the Sony was because I fell into that Sony Proprietary Trap of Doom™. I already bought a 2GB Memory Stick Duo Pro Super Duper for the PSP and I didn't want to buy another memory format or risk being stuck with someone else's proprietary trash. I already have a camera that uses Smartmedia, which is useless to me as it's a dead format. In fact, I don't think it ever went beyond the 128MB range. At least with the Memory Stick, if my camera becomes obsolete, I can continue to use it with my PSP.

The other obvious reason was that the Cybershot had fairly positive reviews. I was cautious about the touch-screen interface, some like it and some hate it, but playing around with it in the store eased my worries. I still prefer the UI on my old Fuji Finepix, but the Cybershot is intuitive enough (though I haven't played around with the manual settings enough yet.) The photos are fine too, I guess.

What I really want to bitch about (always need to be negative) is the battery. This is my biggest problem with the Cybershot: to charge the battery, you have to take it out of the camera, put it in a charger and plug it in. On its own this isn't so bad, but the problem arises from the fact that when you plug the camera to your computer via USB, it doesn't draw power from it. Thus, if you are charging your battery, you can not connect the camera to the PC. Similarly, if the battery is in the camera, leaving it plugged in drains it. I've already had the battery die on me in the middle of a file transfer.

This is a basic feature that I expect from a camera, especially at this price. Not to my surprise, I did discover that there is a dock for the camera, but it's a $100 more!

That right there is the Sony that I have grown to despise.

The city is going through a major boom right now. It has changed drastically in the two years that I've been out of it, and the change wasn't just more sprawl; a lot of it is centralized. Condo tower after condo tower is going up in the city centre, all of which are engulfing and overshadowing Mississauga's iconic city centre. Soon, they too will be overshadowed by this massive thing.

While the now obscured civic centre might be the public face of Mississauga, the real icon, to me, always was Lakeview Generating Station. An old coal power station along the lake that, with its four massive smoke stacks, was visible from nearly anywhere in the city. Most of my school years were spent on a street almost directly north of it, so with the slope of the road, Lakeview was a daily (and prominent) site. For me it was the ultimate symbol of the city: giant, ugly, dirty, and unescapable.

On June 12th, the four smoke stacks will be demolished. I, for one, will miss them. Unfortunately, the demolition is on a Monday in the morning, so I won't be able to see it firsthand. On the plus side, since they are so conspicuous I can see them from my apartment. Sort of. It won't be an impressive show from this distance, but at least I'll get one last look.

Of the highlights shown on Christie's site, the one thing that appeals the most to me is actually one of the "cheapest" items: a "Resikkan non-playing brass flute".

That flute was used in one of the best episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and, later on, in one of the cheesiest moments of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's a cool item that I wouldn't mind having, but there's no way that I'd pay $800 for it. I can get a functional next generation game console for that and still have money left over for a bunch of games. That'd get a lot more use than a non-working flute.

Speaking of which:

It even has its own weblog.

While the crab-filled games were a vast minority on the showfloor at E3, they remained very visible because of their name brand recognition and/or the focus they were given by Microsoft and Sony during their respective press conferences.

The first was Sony's showing of the generic-looking Resistence: The Fall of Man, a game which seemingly combines Half-Life 2 with every World War II shooter ever. This is what we call "original" IP. No self-respecting Half-Life 2 clone can go around without half-Life headcrab clones, so this game has its full share. Not just small crabs, but giant ones too.

Then came the Genji 2 demo, which made me laugh and laugh so much. The idiocy of it has already caused it to become a bit of an internet joke, and it can be seen in the Sony Press Conference in One Minute video that's making the rounds. Once the giant crab creature showed its face in this historic game with real battles from history, there was no saving Sony's showing.

Microsoft came next and the crab hit the fan. That was proof enough of a trend. Thus, I present the E3 Crabtacular:

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In the first minute of that trailer, before they even started to expose what the movie was about, I noticed one thing that pretty much forever soured the movie for me. Perhaps that's a bit melodramatic, as it is an inconsequential little error, but it's one of those little things that you notice that just bugs you like rediculous IP numbers on TV shows. While it's not on the scale of Hackers like misrepresentation (but what is really?) This crazy URL'ed Wall Street Journal covers just that very thing.

If you notice that one thing without any prior knowledge of its existence, you would surely score some geek cred points. Unfortunately for me, I didn't just notice it -- I wrote about it online. That makes me doubly lame.

I won't tell you what it is, but I'll leave you with two very obvious clues right below this...

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With each generation of consoles, I was disappointed that no one would take on the Shadowrun name. It's unfortunate since the emergence of the internet made some of the game's network elements (hacking systems, etc) feel more relevant, amongst other things.

During the Microsoft press conference, which wasn't streamed live, Shadowrun was announced for XBox 360 and PC. I read about it from someone's text update somewhere. I was excited.

Later, when the video of that press conference became available, I saw the trailer. I was cautious. There was no gameplay footage and the animation and look and feel of the trailer was a little... weak.

Later in the press conference, during a demonstration of XBox to Vista Live connectability, I saw a very, very brief clip. I was annoyed. What they showed was nothing more than a generic-looking FPS deathmatch. Maybe there's a chance it'll turn out good; that it'll have a great single player campaign with strong RPG elements and all that good stuff. A small chance. Maybe. Maybe not.

Now I'm disappointed that someone finally did revive the Shadowrun name and I wish they just left it alone.

I'm not sure if that's the company that Sony wants to be bundled with. Their launch price is making the -- then deemed overly expensive -- XBox 360 Premium price of $399.99 USD seem like a downright bargain. That will definitely work to Microsoft's advantage.

Since Microsoft already has established hardware, they don't need to spend their time hyping the technology. They can focus on the games and if they do that during their press conference today, instead of pushing bullshit like XNA and Vista, then they will knock the wind right out of Sony's sails.

With my convenient setup, I was able to watch both game two of the Senators and Sabres series and Sony's E3 press-conference at GameSpot's E3 Live site. When one got dull and boring, I'd focus on the other. I didn't miss much of the hockey game.

Perhaps I'm becoming increasingly jaded and I need to lighten up, but the majority of the content that Sony was peddling looked uninspired and dull. After talking sales, Sony showed a number of PSP trailers. Apart from Loco Roco, most were boring. Then came the PS3... and footage of a PS2 (Gran Turismo 4) game with higher resolution. Then a historic action game with real historic battles from Japan's past--a past which apparently involved giant crab creatures. I don't remember that from the history books. Then a God of War clone; then a Karaoke game; then an eye-toy powered physical card game, which was cool tech but seemed completely impractical. Then a whole bunch of short trailers that showed nothing. Even Metal Gear Solid 4 felt tired.

After a couple of disconnections of the stream, Sony was gearing up its big guns. The first? A motion sensor in the controller (where have I seen that before.) Innovative. It's not surprising, really, but they referred to the addition as "innovative" at least a half dozen times. Really now. While the tech is similar to Nintendo's controller, there is a strong difference in philosophy.

Nintendo used the motion sensor as a means to simplify the interface. Sony just tacked it onto an already busy Dual Shock controller. The new DualShock now has 12 buttons, 2 analog sticks, 1 d-pad, bluetooth wireless, 6-directional motion sensing, and vibration feedback (do they still have this, considering that lawsuit?). Whereas Nintendo removed, Sony added. The differences in philosophy are obvious. For Nintendo, less is more; for Sony, more more more.

Then they showed off Warhawk, a title that uses the motion sensor for control. Warhawk is the one game in the presentation (apart from Loco Roco) that I'm interested in. I very much enjoyed the original Playstation game and I welcome a sequel, especially since it's just the first sequel since the Playstation's launch. It hasn't been overdone and oversold yet. However, watching the guy (lead designer?) play the game didn't fill me with confidence. Maybe it's just him and maybe he was being overly exaggerated just to show it off, but with the motion sensor control Warhawk was flopping and twisting around like a plastic bag in the wind. It didn't strike me as nearly as smooth as the original pre-analog game's tight controls, which made the game what it was.

After all that came the price. Almost. First came the revelation that the system will launch in two tiers (where have I seen that before) -- a 20GB version and a 60GB version (there are likely many more changes beyond that but they're obviously hushed a bit to make the system seem like more of a "deal" -- CONFIRMED). The loser version will cost $499 USD. The real system will be $599 USD (a $100 difference does not cover a 40GB difference -- I'm sure there are other handicaps: CONFIRMED).

Sony, you might try to disguise it with a "budget" version of your console, but that doesn't change the fact that you are trying to sell a console with very similar games to what I can get now for 600 dollars. To that, I say "fuck that." By the time you launch, I'll likely be able to get an XBox 360 and a Rev Wii (we'll see about that during tomorrow's press-conference) for the same price.

The only good news from all of this? The Ottawa Sentators lost.

But the name Wii not wii-thstanding, Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don't listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal--they blog a lot--but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. "[Wii] was unimaginable for them," Iwata says. "And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds."

The article then concluded with a trendy Nintendo+Apple comparison, which reminded me of something Signal vs. Noise posted once: looking back at an original iPod announcement thread with the hindsight that we have now. Their (sarcastic) comment then? Apple should have just listened to their customers and never released the iPod.

There's a multitude of social-economic effects of this, mostly involving cross-border business, tourism and all that other fun stuff. Whatever. The important question is: what does it matter to me? And with the kinds of products that I buy, small media things, it means a potential for a lot of savings.

The higher the dollar rises, the cheaper and cheaper importing from the US (or anywhere else abroad that charges by USD) becomes. And with relatively low shipping costs (for books, DVDs, games, etc), it is becoming increasingly cost-effective to just order stuff from abroad.

"Budget" games, which go for $19.99 USD, have always been exactly ten dollars more expensive here. This price is always fixed, so no matter how much the dollar fluctuates, they stay at $29.99 CAD. It's sort of like when books have a price tag printed on them in USD and CAD. No matter how much the dollar changes, the price will remain as it was when it was printed (barring sales and all that). Now, if I order that same $19.99 budget game from the US, all I have to pay is $22.38. 25% savings!

Of course, there's shipping too, but for small items it doesn't affect things too much. If I go by Amazon's rates, for three budget games shipping would cost me about $11.06. The games would be $66.60. In total three games with shipping would cost $77.66 CAD.

Meanwhile, if I were to walk into a local store and buy the exact same games with cash and, obviously, no shipping, I'd be paying $89.97

I save twelve dollars, get it delivered to my door and I don't have to go and deal with game store employees. This rising Canadian dollar is going to be a boon for online shopping.