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…)

          

After some localized riots, muggings, robberies, and all around stupidity, hypothermia and wallet weight reduction about 280,000 people world wide managed to get there hands on shiny new Playstation 3s. I had considered waiting inline for one until I realized that there were people in this world with far more free time on their hands then I. I took the day off from work but one look at the lines and I decided to simply enjoy the long weekend with my girlfriend. Polling the lines however, I found that most people weren’t actually interested in keeping the console for themselves. This dedication came almost entirely from the idea that they could make money on the console. If there are this many people SELLING the console then who is buying it? Certainly it’s people with more money then time but is the console really worth it?
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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…)

          

Have you been to a GameStop lately? If so you were probably accosted at the door by a register jockey in a red shirt asking if you if you had any trade ins or wished to place a pre-order. Nothing against the hard working GameStop employees, it’s their job after all. I sometimes feel bad for them, but then I realize that I made the choice to not ever work in retail again and they have that very same freedom. Once when I was asked this question I asked back of my friendly semi-local GameStop sales associate: why should I pre-order? (more…)