thoughthead

Monday night around 9:45PM (EST) StripClubDj became the first person on Xbox Live to break the 100,000 Gamerscore barrier. How do I know this? How do I even know who StripClubDj is? Well I was on mygamercard.net that night and saw he was nearing that milestone and that he had posted in a thread talking about shooting for that goal. So I stuck around and watched his Gamerscore roll over. Gamerscores are a funny thing, they can fundamentally change the way you approach gaming, they can change how you think about a gaming community and they can open the doors to exciting new experiences you might not have otherwise tried as well as make you do things you’d really rather not do. (more…)

          

I was reading an article on /. and someone mentioned that they thought the Wii had the best launch line up of the next gen, because if you averaged all of the review scores it would be not only the highest but have the most titles. So I decided to put it to the test…. I went to gamerankings.com and collected the scores for all of the launch day titles for each of the 3 next gen systems and this is the result.

My guidelines were simple: None of this “launch window” crap I only took the games that were available on the day the console was released in the US. Scores were all rounded to the nearest whole number when placed on a scale out of 100, and I listed the scores from both professionals as well as users with the final verdict being an average of the two. (more…)

          

You may or may not have heard the nerdy outcry of FOUL over the recent discovery (translated) that two new Activision games for the Xbox 360 (Tony Hawk’s Project 8 by Neversoft and Call of Duty 3 by Treyarch) don’t actually run at high-definition resolutions, but instead some seemingly arbitrary lower resolution, presumably this is done to help improve their frame rates. Regardless of the reason and regardless of the fact that both of those games still look great it brings up some interesting political issues in addition to the technical ones. (more…)

          

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Fall update was just released today. with 80+ new features and bug fixes you’d think the buzz surrounding the 2nd major software update for the console would be that of excitement or perhaps wonderment over some new software toys to play with. Instead I see nothing but Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (otherwise known as FUD) and a hefty helping of paranoia. Basically all of the game pirates who hide behind the thin veil of a security blanket they call “backups” are worried that their free games pass is about to expire. (more…)

          

[this is a repost of the original article posted on Xbox-Scene.]

Rockstar is probably most well known for their Grand Theft Auto series of games. A game that sells in enormous quantities with each new release and is constantly in the press over due to it’s excessive use of video game violence, sexual content, and language that would make a sailor blush. Even Rockstar’s other games are fairly “adult oriented” in terms of their content. So when the announcement dropped they would be making an exclusive Xbox 360 game it’s pretty clear what people were expecting to see. (more…)