Wow! I think I just wet myself with this trailer.

Meanwhile, the Official Xbox Magazine talks of more Mass Effect DLC in their February 2009 issue, but nothing more. It feels like Mass Effect 2 is closer than the DLC that I’ve been waiting months for.

lol. And I thought I escaped this crap.

oh well … in time for the holidays I guess.

You first need to make an initial investment in hardware. The fastest route is simply to buy a console. PC gaming is ridiculously expensive if you want to experience games the way they were meant to be played. Yes you can get by not upgrading every few years, but you are not going to get the intended gaming experience. So yes, buy a console. They are a one off purchase and they will last years until the next generation of consoles come out. Even if you bought one today, we still have a few more years until the current generation of consoles go away. Hell, even the Playstation 2 is racking up sales.

When buying a console, there really is no question that the Xbox 360 is the way to go unless you are looking for console-specific exclusives like Metal Gear Solid 4 or want to feel like you are playing baseball while swinging a plastic controller, get a Wii. If for some need you need to convince yourself and society that it’s just not for games, then the Playstation 3 plays Blu-Ray. Aside from being as cheap as most of the cheapest Blu-Ray players out there, the PS3 can play games. The Blu-Ray player alone is worth the purchase price.

When you finally have your hardware, it’s time to get down and dirty with gaming and get yourself some games. While the majority of people wait for that one game to come out before making a game purchase, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can have your cake and eat it too. After making that console purchase, head over to Gamefly and sign up for an account. If you are familiar with Netflix, then Gamefly is Netflix for gaming. You can sign up for one or two games you can have out at a time and return them anytime you want. One retail game alone is worth close to three months of Gamefly. This is great for games that while great when played through once or twice, you never go back to ever again. Great games such as Bioshock are still great games, but do you really need to have them sitting on your shelf for sentimental purposes? No. You can also purchase games at Gamefly for around ten dollars less than you would get them at retail. After you’ve been there a few months, you can start earning Gamefly dollars (5 every three months) that you can use to keep the games you’ve rented and earn up to a 10% discount on every game purchase. Their Gamefly store is full of cheap games that may not be new, but can be fifty or more percent less than their retail price.

Another alternative is Gamenflix. They are cheaper … even at three games out at a time, but their game library is so much smaller than Gamefly and getting a game on launch day is like winning the lottery. Hey at least they offer movie rentals as well, although you’ll have to see for yourself how good that service is.

If you already have a great wealth of games and don’t know what to do with them, head over to Goozex. At Goozex, you trade your games with other members in exchange for points that you can use to get other games from other users. It’s a great way to get rid of games you thought you were going to spend some time with but ended up as a one night stand. Even old Playstation 1, Gamecube, and PC games are tradeadable. Chances are sooner or later some fool with a taste for the glory days of 2D will want the game in return for giving you a few points. If you don’t have games to trade, you can always buy points to get you started.

If those ideas don’t work, there is nothing like good old bargain hunting. CheapAssGamer is a great resource for deals on the internet and your local Wal-Mart. Sign up at their forums and feel free to troll around and occasionally give other cheap ass gamers like yourself a heads up on a deal. Other sites like Craigslist and eBay can have great deals for the patient. The key word here is patience.

Woot and Stootsi can also turn up some great deals even though they are not strictly gaming sites. Both sites sell one item a day and are usually marked way down from their retail price. You may not buy an item every day, but chances are, if you go to the site enough, something will catch your eye. Stootsi had Guitar Hero 3 pack for the Xbox 360 for $40. Not new, but better than $100.

After you’ve gone through those tips and you are still on the fence about jumping in, you have to ask yourself, do you really want to game? If you are gaming already, do you really need to stay in line for that midnight release to get a game? Probably not. Wait a few months and that game will cost you 20 bucks in the bargain bin. Patience is key.

Game on!

First off, I love gamerscores(GS) because it makes me feel good all over about my e-peen. It is however a distraction to my gaming because …

It makes me play games that just aren’t fun solely because there is gamerscore to be had. I hate every minute of it … but … must … get gamerscore.

They aren’t done very well or very fairly. Games like Devil May Cry 4 give you less than 200 GS for beating the game even on the hardest levels … I mean what the fuck? On the other hand, NBA 2k6 gives you a full 1000/1000 GS in one game … I mean what the fuck? There really has to be a benchmark on how hard it is to obtain GS. You shouldn’t have to play a game until you want to gouge your eyes out to get a decent amount of GS in it. There really should be no online only achievements unless the game is specifically targetted as an online game. If you are going to have single player at all, you should never have online achievements. Call of Duty 4 for example has no online only achievements, but yet online play is such a big part of the game. Kudos COD4! Achievements should also be possible by mere mortals not the geek with bionic fingers. Congratulations to those bionic geeks, but hey lets throw the rest of us a bone.

It makes people cheat. For their love of gamerscore and big e-peens, people cheat their way to it. People love online e-peens, but the whole system of detecting achievements is fubar.

Gamesaves! Gamesaves! Gamesaves! Sometimes I just want to use a friend’s save or a downloaded save and dick around already completed levels, but for some reason Microsoft makes everyone feel bad about it. Sure there people who cheat, but what about the ones who just want to play around? It’s my game. I paid money for it, I should be able to do whatever I goddamn feel like. You can find PS3 saves in big gaming sites like GameFAQs, but if you want 360 saves, you have to go underground in some seedy forum shunned by the outside world. Because of Microsoft’s paranoia and it’s implementation of DRM, you can’t simply upload saves to the Xbox. You need a “resigner” to sign the games to your profile which you either have to go to said seedy forum or buy from Xploder. Hey Microsoft! … let us legitimately use someone else’s saves! Fix your gamerscore system so that you CAN’T get gamerscore from simply loading someone else’s save up.

To conclude …

I have a PS3 and a 360. GTA IV is coming out in a few weeks … I’m getting the 360 version because of achievements and gamerscore.

A friend and I set up a cracked Call of Duty 4 dedicated server. That means, yes you can play you downloaded copies of COD4 on it. For more info, visit BFWGaming.

On another note, Madden 08 on Xbox Live is so laggy, I’d rather watch 20th Century silent films. I mean c’mon! … where the hell is all this “great matchmaking” through Xbox Live Gold. Note to all the network dev team … match the fucking games that aren’t across the world from each other!

As a gesture of apology for Xbox Live downtime throughout the holidays, Microsoft has offered Undertow for free to all Xbox Live members. I begin to download my copy and I get an error. Is this a joke? I guess not. Oh well, I have until Sunday, 11:59 PM to download it.

1. More Xbox classic games. The 360 already has the best backwards computability when compared to the Wii or the PS3, so I really can’t complain, but I would love to play Top Spin which came with the first Xbox as a bundled game. More is more though.

2. Samba or just general Windows shares. I don’t really want to have to run MCE or the other alternatives when I already have Windows shares all over. NFS would be great too, but I can dream I guess.

3. Shared Itunes/DAAP library support. Lets face it, not everyone uses Microsoft products and shouldn’t have to.

4. Youtube or other video site support. What would be nice is Stage 6 support for high quality streaming. Hell, even MSN Video would be nice.

5. Web browser. Why doesn’t it have one already? Even the Nintendo Wii uses Opera! Microsoft already has a web browser product, it doesn’t take much imagination to include it in the 360.

6. Peripherals like this.

7. Support for more media formats. The addition of support XviD and DivX are great, but again, less is not more, more is more.

… and Merry Christmas to all!