It’s my Wii in a box! Booya!

Back to hell with you, foul console!

Ruckus raised an important issue the other day: Why so much hate toward the Playstation 3?

The true disappointment here, I believe, is in our own expectations. We had good reason to love the original Playstation and Playstation 2 to pieces. Still hot from our previous love affairs with Sony, we gladly took Ken Kutaragi’s promises to be gospel, the promises of “so much more than a gaming console”, promises that, in any other case, we would have written off as bloated hype. We allowed ourselves to believe Playstation 3 would vanquish world hunger and global warming.

But no. After all the talk, all the (puzzling) advertising, and all the build-up, the Playstation 3 is merely a video game console making its debut. And as with all console premieres, developers haven’t had enough time with the hardware to put together the gotta-have-it titles that the public wants. Resistance: Fall of Man is nice…ok let’s face it, it’s a so-so shooter at best. But Gears of War straight up kicked its ass. The PS3 is a very capable and feature-rich console, but somehow it’s not what we want it to be, at least not yet.

Mind you, our attitudes were not much different at the release of the Xbox 360. Microsoft under-supplied retailers, shipped some consoles that were DOA, and the initial releases were, to say the least, underwhelming. But after a year, look who’s laughing. Chances are that at this time next year, the Playstation 3 will be doing just fine and we’ll forget all about this initial disappointment that we feel. But again, why are we disappointed? Because we had hopes and expectations for the company that once launched us into a new generation of console gaming to do it yet again. And sadly, I believe that the hard truth is finally setting in: despite multi-core CPU’s, dedicated physics processors, higher poly-counts and advanced lighting, next generation gaming is not what we expected it to be. Oh and if you have the urge to play the “It costs $600″ card, save it. If the titles were there to back up the PS3’s release, you wouldn’t see the console selling under MSRP on eBay nor would you see them on store shelves. Just watch how badly the $600 hurts iPhone sales come June.

It’s your turn, leave a comment.

Recently, a good friend of mine–we’ll call him “Slybone”–had a harrowing experience. He flirted with Insanity. He waltzed with Madness. He took bugfuck Crazy home to meet her folks. But he survived, came out the other side, and I asked him to share his story. At first, he was understandably reluctant. But I explained that EMB was a place of unflinching truth (who can forget Daedalus’s description of his two weeks as a fluffer on the set of Hanna Montana?), and he agreed. Be warned, readers: this story makes The Descent look like a sleepover romp in a tent cave made of fluffy blankets.

Slybone’s story

“It was a beautiful, crisp winter afternoon. I stopped at the local Big Box retailer to see if they had a day-of-release copy of Lost Planet. Now, I need to explain that I truly loathe this place, but the nearest alternatives are 60 miles in one direction or 30 miles in the other, and while the chances of them actually having the game were slim, there was a chance. After all, this was the store that sold MS Flight Sim X a week early by mistake. I hustled past the front-of-store child slapping area and made my way to the electronics section.

“Of course, they didn’t have Lost Planet. But there, in the case, was something unexpected. Like a chimera, a unicorn, or a watchable Uwe Boll film, it was a mythical beast that I had often wondered if I would actually ever see in the flesh: a Playstation 3.” (Read on …)

One level down, one more level to go…

“Hey fellas, you can have me your way…”

One of the biggest advantages consoles have over PC rigs is portability. Though that advantage is waning with bigger and bigger consoles (PS3) and HDTVs with DVI and VGA inputs, it’s still easier to plug and play with multiple players. I can fit my Xbox with accessories and games in a bag and take it with me without much hassle which is what I did over the holidays. It was an old fashioned game-a-thon the likes of which I haven’t witnessed since EMB Gaming Weekend 2005…

(Read on …)

Back in 2005, I signed up for Xbox Live on my original Xbox using the name, you guessed it, Brixtone. I wasn’t using it much back then and I also managed to get my console banned for modding, so I opted to discontinue my subscription. Now that I have an Xbox 360, I’ve decided to give Live another shot. The Xbox dashboard even has a handy option to ‘Recover Gamertag from Xbox Live’. But it didn’t work.

After spending an hour on the phone with India-based Xbox Live support, satiating their prepared scripts by power-cycling my console and reentering my information ad infinitum, I was transferred to a supervisor. The supervisor had a slightly different script and it read like this: If you ever cancel your Xbox Live subscription, neither you nor anyone else can use that gamertag again. When I asked why, the supervisor answered “for security purposes”. I would like to personally thank Microsoft for keeping my gamertag secure from me as I surely would have used it to do evil unto myself.

Today’s lesson: If you find a gamertag that you like, remain subscribed to Xbox Live for the rest of your life to keep that gamertag secure. Otherwise, the world’s largest computing corporation won’t be able to get it back for you. Fucking idiots.

Hello there, TV viewers

Last night, in the World of Warcraft, the Eat My Bomb crew rallied in the town of Goldshire. Our mission: Conquer the Goldshire Inn. Our ranks were summoned to the town and upon arrival uttered, “We’re doing what?” Just a few simple steps of hopping on a mailbox, getting stuck on a wall, hopping on the roof, and then climbing the chimney. When I say simple steps, I mean it took about an hour to get everyone up there. While the task was frustrating at times, I think all of us were quite pleased once we took the summit.

I can’t explain to myself why this sort of thing is entertaining. Is it because the developers at Blizzard never intended for us to be up there? Is it a mental throwback to finding secret ledges and exploiting bugs in 8-bit Nintendo games? Either way, I got my 50 cents worth of joy out of scaling the building, and I look forward to our next conquest.