Beyond Occident

These past few weeks have brought some exciting things into the 360 arena. From Unreal Tournament III to Skyland, there is something for everyone. In preparation for a downloading frenzy, I finally cleaned out my meager 20 gb hdd. Microsoft really has to stop giving us these crappy excuses for not giving bigger drives. Anywho, back to the good 360 news. The Crackdown demo has been released for download. The verdict? It rox my sox. I haven’t played a Grand Theft Auto-esque game in awhile and this one blows them all away. Mostly thanks to the cyborg type powers of the government agent you control. It is almost superhero like as you scale buildings and jump from rooftop to rooftop. A recommended download? Definitely.

In other downloading news, two new Gears of War maps have been released. I downloaded them but haven’t got to try ‘em out, due mostly to CoD 3. And today Major Nelson had news of the next ten Xbox Arcade games. The biggest one? Definitely Worms. The thought of Xbox Live enabled Worms combat is almost too much to bear. In the movie marketplace, I snatched up the first episode of Skyland (an anime on Nicktoons) as they had a promotion giving the first episode away for free until yesterday. I watched it and I must admit… it’s pretty good. An Inconvenient Truth is also on the marketplace, which is probably going to be the first movie download. Remember that Cops and Robbers ad I showed for the CTF thing (one post below). The entire 3 minute match is ready for download on Live and it is pretty nifty.

On the gaming front, I was very very very very excited to find out Unreal Tournament III is confirmed for the 360. Multiplayer goodness to the extreme. Hopefully they figure out a lobby system that is better than Gears. It was also mentioned that custom user built content will be ready for download for the 360. Awesome. And following Epic’s policy, all of their downloadable contact costs nil. Nada. Nothing. Other exciting game announcements is that the Shivering Isles expansion for Elder Scrolls IV is going to be big, sweet, and not on a disc. Hmmm… how is Bethesda going to figure this one out since 20 gb is kind of… small… for an expansion, videos, demos, arcade games, etc.

And in celebration of this exciting post I give you my most anticipated Xbox 360 games of 2007.

BioShock
Halo 3
Unreal Tournament III
Mass Effect
Crackdown
Project Offset
Guitar Hero II
Half Life 2 Mega Pack
and a bunch of Xbox Live Arcade games

Youtube is awesome. Why? Because they turn boring evenings into something meaningful. Case in point? I love watching ads for various products (good ads of course) and Xbox 360 has some of the sweetest ads ever. And that isn’t the inner fanboy talking, they really are cool. So I came across a new European 360 ad based around Cops and Robbers. It’s the vid right below so watch then continue reading.

Now that’s just nifty. So after watching that a few times (Can you find the Halo 3 references in it?) I felt the cold uplifting tingly feeling of a great idea come upon me. What if I got a group of people together at school and we could do a capture the flag match like this and then broadcast it over HCTV. Now I know you’re thinking “What the heck is he smoking?” but let me explain. At the end of the video a black background could come up with white words saying (and this is just a lame example): “School is Fun” or “Get Involved”. Then we could justify showing it on morning announcements (and if that isn’t enough, Mr. Grahem is a easy going person and will let us show it just cuz it would be sweet).

The CTF match itself would be scripted. We would be in school uniform with red team wearing red shirts/polos and black team wearing black shirts/polos. As long as we are creative, it’ll be the coolest thing shown on HCTV all year. Red team storms black team’s base on the second floor of the old building. They toss the flag out of the window to a waiting red team member. He runs out of the alley and jumps into a waiting car which heads off the red team base in the new building. This would be impossible to film if we did it all at the same instant so if we break it up we’ll be able to reposition camaras, make sure no traffic is coming, etc. The black team brings a ladder outside of the chemistry/physics room. We film someone going up. We show them stealing the red flag before a red team member notices. They get the flag out of the building but get caught in the old building. And lots of interesting things happen in between.

Oh boy. I have to go draw out my ideas for the match so I can have ‘em ready for tomorrow. American Idol (or should I say Indian Idol?) begins tomorrow morning too which should be exciting. I’ll leave everyone with the never-aired 360 ad “Bang!” and then version that the univ. of Florida did off of it. Enjoy!

Sunday morning brought another release of Wiis to store shelves and I would like to congratulate my brother on nabbing one while waiting for ~6 hours in his car, while snow piled all around. May he have many more days of exciting Wii-action. Hopefully I can go over to his house and dominate in some Wii-Tennis.

Now onto the subject of me. Being the poor jobless student I am, I recently purchased The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the good ol’ Gamecube. It’s a nice refreshment from the cel-shaded graphics of Wind Waker and so far I’m pretty impressed. The story is as good as usual but, as many feared, the classic formula for Zelda is starting to get old. Going through Death Mountain for the gizillionth time is starting to lose its appeal, as are the customary weapon upgrades you get. While the game isn’t of Game of the Year substance, it is still an excellent game.

While on the subject of video games, Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion is probably my most played game ever. My recent quest to get all 1000 achievement points took a hit when for some reason the Mages Guild just skipped an advancement and the 10 points for becoming a Master-Wizard are lost to me. Bummer. All that is left is a couple more main storyline achievements and just about all Fighter’s Guild quests. And I’m feeling a major lack of caring since the Fighter’s Guild quests are lame. But due to this massive amount of 360 lovin’, my gamerscore has been pushed up to 1576. Congrats to me!

And on a 100% complete turn of subject, all of MIT’s course materials are available for free online. I won’t lie, I found it rather exciting looking through the Anthropology courses. Oh, and WordPress just did some magic and now you can preview links before clicking on them.

To all my loyal D&D players, the campaign is once again on the road to completion! Wohoo! Indeed, I’m so far into development that I can show this revealing image of the campaign! Have a gander and try to contain your excitement.

This week I cover the entire spectrum with a rather depressing movie and an incredible sweet looking one. Can you guess which is which?

Although Steve may have stole this from me, I’m showing it anyway. Because it’s just that good. Here it is, the fabled internal Kodak commercial that is absolutely hilarious.

After several days of obscure and over-the-top tribal dances and rituals, all has come to naught as Steve Jobs didn’t announce a 12 inch (or so) Macbook Pro with dedicated graphics. But he did announce (with much cheering) what we all knew was coming, the iPhone. It’s pretty which is a requirement for all Apple products. I’d classify the iPhone as a smartphone (Specs found here) and while I would love to play around with it, a couple factors keep me from pledging my support.

For one, it’s darn expensive. $600 for the 8gb model and that’s with a 2 year contract! And there is but one button. As exciting as a touch screen might be, I can foresee myself typing with this device alot. And a qwerty keyboard just seems more desirable. This was called a video iPod by Jobs. I hope for everyone’s sake we will have a true vPod because last time I checked, devices with but 4 to 8 gbs and no expandable memory may not be very… optimized.. for the video storage. And it’s carried by Cingular only (Booo!).

I have a feeling that most of my dislike for the iPhone stems from the fact that I don’t see much point in a smartphone for me anyway. I know many people find them necessary in the workplace, but, with college in less than a year, I’d rather carry a small phone for calling and some light multimedia (like the w810i) and an actual laptop, so I can do all the things the iPhone can do but in its full glory. Oh, and it costs $600. Maybe Apple and Sony can join together for some PS3 – iPhone bundles?

Where’s the blu-ray drive?

The Bill Gates keynote at CES is being broadcasted live online and it’s causing my five hours of homework that I have to be more like 8 hours. Oh well. Well, it’s 10:21 and we’re approaching a half hour. Some dude came on after Bill Gates and showed off some pretty sweet Vista stuff. Like OS to IE interaction for live search and the most awesomest 3D search. Just plug in your 360 controller to your computer and you can drive down the streets of Vegas. And Media Center looks incredible. Back to physics!

10:25 Robbie Bach just came out! WOhoo! Time for some 360 & Zune news!

10:32 I think I just saw the MacBook playing Halo 2 using Boot Camp. Robbie just mentioned 360. 10.4 million 360s sold. 2.7 million copies of Gears of War sold. Over 300 360 titles by end of year.

10:34 Halo 3!!! Just played MNF commercial. “Negative sign, I think we lost him”. “Not yet”. Showcase of 360 – Vista Live. Uno 360 and Vista being played together cross platform.

10:41 Media Center again. HDDVD has outsold Blu-Ray. IPTV was shown using the 360.

10:48 Bummer. No major Xbox revisions announced yet. Ford and Microsoft’s Sync service showcased. It accepts ZIP drives!! w00t!

11:04 After giving a showcase of a “Future Home”, Gates thanks the audience and leaves.

Well.. all those rumors about revised xboxes, advancements to the Zune (which are badly needed) are just took a major beating. The lack of anything exciting is very disappointing, although the Vista showcase was pretty neat. Hopefully, something more exciting happens at the MacWorld keynote coming in a couple days.