And so it seems the overwhelming urge to amplify my opinion has outweighed the turmoil of depressive realization that nothing I say ever really matters…

This blog has been, for the most part, inactive for a while. The initial cease of posts came about when humbled by the genius of a podcast called Radio Lab. A friend strongly recommended I check it out, and I urge all to do the same. This interrupt- the time I took listening to all the back-episodes of the show, impacted a number of my habits: gaming, podcasts, reading. I actually quit World of Warcraft and went without gaming for several weeks (I did manage to check out Assassin’s Creed on PC in DX 10 and SSB Brawl for Wii somewhere in there).

That all said, during my hiatus I DID manage to gain a good amount of weight, and start drinking some very nice beer (blog to come); then by chance today, I picked up a shiny new object called the Wii Fit.

I showed up to a Best Buy in northern New Jersey twenty minutes before the store opened, six people were ahead of me in line. By the time they opened the doors, there were probably an additional fifteen or twenty people lined up behind me all waiting for the Fit.

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I have mentioned before that I try to remain relatively neutral in the Apple/Microsoft battle. I dual boot XP and OS X on a MacBook (via Boot Camp), own two iPods, built a mid-range gaming PC with Vista (specs below), and am happy as a cow at a pig roast.

I have been a Windows fan since Workgroups 3.11, and became a proponent of OS X only recently, after purchasing a MacBook. Now, almost a year after its release, I am truly hard-pressed to bash Vista. I am far from being a fan-boy and will admit that as an operating system Vista certainly has its shortcomings; however, in my personal experience this has been Microsoft’s most stable off-the-shelf release. Perhaps it’s because my hardware is up to snuff, none of my software is dated, and I have tweaked and optimized my system to ensure smooth performance…or perhaps it’s because Vista, for me, is merely a means of accessing WoW and Orange Box. Also worth an honorable mention, CS3 runs like a dream. (more…)

Once upon a time, the word “monopoly” referred to a harmless board game. Actually, I would imagine the word came first, then the board game… In either case, the scenario is the same - market takeover. The recent Activision and Vivendi merger shows us that no industry is exempt from the reach of capitalism (just in case EA’s undefeated trek of growth through acquisition hadn’t convinced you); and while technically a monopoly eliminates opposition and offers a strictly single-seller marketplace, this news comes as clairvoyant insight of a bleak future. I get a bit watery-eyed just thinking of all the blood, sweat, and tears ‘mom & pop’ game developers and publishers, now void in a world succumb to sweat-shop produced games: just imagine thousands of innocent third-world foreign children packed in warehouses, overworked and underpaid, programming away into the wee hours of morning over obsolete workstations. OK, not exactly…but this is still huge. From DailyTech:

With the combined forces of Activision and Vivendi, Activision Blizzard is expected to have approximately $3.8 billion in pro forma combined calendar 2007, potentially overtaking EA with the highest operating margins of any major third-party video game publisher.

Let’s just hope we don’t see some sort of hack & slash cost-cutting routine (there’s a pun in there somewhere), because that’s when the consumer loses. Oh, and on a side note– Activision Blizzard?? Are they serious? $3.8 billion in a calendar year makes them the new powerhouse in interactive entertainment and the best name they can come up with is Activision Blizzard? Nice, throw a few to marketing for that one.

Well folks, Nintendo launched the ‘Check Mii Out’ channel on November 11. Meanwhile, I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out how the hell to use the Mii Parade. What is this crap? I don’t understand any of this anyway- I thought there was some way to get my mii to wander around a plaza and mingle with other people’s miis…then I could turn on my Wii and interrupt some kind of sick, twisted, ritualistic mii pagan gathering. Well, Nintendo…?

I haven’t taken the time to sit down with ‘Check Mii Out’ yet, but someone over at Nintedo Wii Fanboy did and (*surprise*) liked it. Based on what I read, I’m not dropping everything to go waste my time there- not just yet, anyhow. People are still looking for a way to effectively, efficiently share their miis and this *may* be the place to make that happen, but currently the channel features no more than a mii gallery and a single contest. Hopefully we’ll see some sort of an online tie to this exhibition–where Wii triumphs in gameplay, it truly lacks in social interactivity and has some major ground to cover behind XBOX Live.