While this game won't be winning any prizes, I found it to be so much more appealing then the GTA clone I had originally wrote it off as. I managed to finish the game today by killing Wang of the Shen Gi gang. The ending gave me a good laugh and let me know that they are planning a sequel. I did feel a true sense of accomplishment but not from beating down all the gangs. It was from actually being able to climb the Agency tower and getting that all important 4th Agility star. Now I can just about fly across rooftops in Pacific City. I've collected about 300 of the 500 Agility orbs and I plan on getting enough to max out my character to get that all important last achievement. But once the last gang member is gone, there is no one left for you to kill. It kinda makes the sandbox mode afterwards really boring.

Overall though I find it was a good game, then you can beat in a weekend rental. I'll probably be keeping it around until the Halo 3 beta is released, or if there are too many good games out there that I need to rent from GameFly. Good game, but not worth $60. $40 I would consider though.

There are a handful of you reading this blog, so post a comment and let me know what you thought of the game.

Ok now I really enjoy the show Heroes. While it doesn't give quite as much water cooler talk as the show Lost does, at least it's not disappointing me this season like Lost is. I think its a cool idea to use a popular show to help sell a video game, but try not to make it so blatantly obvious. Show the actors from behind playing the game and let it take up almost all the screen, but don't remove us from the world the actors are in. That ruins the show IMHO.

by Daemon Hatfield

March 5, 2007 - The Nielsen Company, the folks who provide television ratings data, have released a new report that reveals videogames now penetrate 41 percent of U.S. homes. Titled "The State of the Console," the article also shows that game penetration has risen by 18.5 percent since 2004. Over the same two year period, the amount of homes with televisions has risen by 1.6 percent.

In the fourth quarter of 2006 there were 45.7 million homes with videogame consoles. The number of homes with consoles connected to the internet (not counting the Wii or PlayStation 3) has grown to more than 4.4 million.

More fun facts: Between September 18, 2006 and December 31, 2006, 93.8 million people played a console at least once for a minute or more. Also, at any given time, about 1.6 million people in the U.S. are playing a videogame console.

Nielsen says this is the first of several reports that will be examining trends in the game industry. Later this year Nielsen will launch GamePlay Metrics, which will meter game play by title, genre, and platform.

Source

Only 10% of homes have their console on the net? Seems low, but it looks to be what Nintendo is looking at.

Worms will be the next Xbox Live arcade game. I can't tell you how much time my brother and I wasted on this game growing up. I plan on wasting a lot more time on it in the near future. At least through the lull of 360 titles right now, we're getting some good Live Arcade games.

While I haven't liked the series since GTA2, I know plenty of people are anticipating this game. Well no new screen shots, but Rockstar North today told us the date we can expect this on the 360 and PS3.

It's October 16th, 1007

I may give this a try, as I didn't think I'd like Crackdown, and I'm actually enjoying the game a lot. Maybe this latest iteration of the series will reinvent itself enough to hold my interest.

Posted Feb 28th 2007 10:27AM by Andrew Yoon
Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3
One of our biggest gripes with the PS3 has been how poorly the system downloads files: you can't resume broken downloads, nor can you do anything whilst your system is downloading a file. No games. No movies. No music. Nada.

This was all supposed to be fixed in Sony's upcoming 1.6 firmware update. But, is it already broken before its release? Apparently so. The Inner Bits has "obtained" info about the upcoming firmware revision, and it's not looking good. The background downloads are limited to while you are in the XMB. If you launch a game, the system will pause your download because "the PS3 needs extra system resources (primarily memory) to do background downloading."

If this is indeed true, it certainly can't be due to the system's inability to play a game and download a file. Although Sony's system has the hardware to deliver the goods, it seems Sony is just not creating user-friendly software to take advantage of the system's "potential." Will we have to wait for yet another firmware revision for Sony to get this right?

Source

If this is totally true, that is such a blow to the PS3. The 360 didn't have background downloading when it first launched and it was added about 4 months later. Not to mention when it launched it worked! We may not have been able to queue up downloads from the start, but we could play games and do other stuff fine, not limited because it took too much memory away from the system. How much memory does it need to download a file? The 360 just uses the part that is allocated for its Guide features and it works fine.

I picked this puppy up on Monday afternoon and its a lot smaller then I thought it would be. It comes with a tag over the USB cord to make sure that you install the software first before you use it. Problem is, Vista drivers aren't on the CD that it ships with. You have to go online and download the Vista software before you can use it. Not REALLY a problem as we're all connected via broadband these days, but still an oversight none the less. I was up and connected in a matter of seconds. Even with my 360 on, I was able to sync up to the receiver with no hassles at all. The only game I had to try was the TMNT demo, but I was unable to get it to work with the controller. I think it is a limitation with the demo and nothing to do with the controller itself. I haven't had much time to test it with anything else yet, but I plan on doing it this evening.

I am really excited in my purchase for this as I also got an invitation to be a beta tester for Windows Live (The Xbox 360 on Vista). I filled out the questionnaire and hopefully I get selected (I rarely don't get in). Maybe I'll be testing Halo 2, or even Uno, but I don't care as I think the ability to interlink the two is just plain amazing.