Hi, everybody! I'm still around, just been lazy. Unemployed at the moment, waiting for the results of my drug testing and physical, so while I've had plenty of free time, I also haven't been paid to sit in front of a computer for eight hours, so I imagine that's to be blamed for my non-blogging. I've been running regularly (even drove up to San Marcos to check out some of the running trails up there), I've been cleaning out my storage locker (I've meant to do this for about a year, but am now doubly motivated knowing that the owner of A-1 Self-Storage was a leading supporter of Proposition 8) and I've been using the hell out of my Netflix subscription. For two reasons.

First, Netflix is finally dropping HD-DVD on December 15th. Can't blame them, they announced they were going to phase it out in January. But I have about thirty movies in my queue in HD-DVD, so I'm trying to get through as many as possible. Which is difficult, since I spent a week and a half trying to get a copy of The Wild Bunch that works. I got two defective discs in a row, and today I received another replacement disc, which was cracked in half. So I gave up; The Wild Bunch is available on their Watch Instantly service, so I'll watch it that way, high-def be damned. I should say, I don't blame Netflix, I imagine problems with the condition of their remaining HD-DVD stock drove their decision to finally drop the format completely. I can't expect them to last forever.

The second reason Netflix has been dominating my attention is that the new xbox update, with streaming movies from Netflix Watch Instantly, is now live. I'd been watching Netflix movies on the Xbox via unofficial software and Vista Media Center, but that stopped working a few weeks ago (since I knew the official solution would soon be available, I didn't bother trying to fix it). But now I have a simple, smooth means of watching streaming movies on my HDTV. And I've been very happy with the final product, mostly. I know the selection could be better, but I have 500 items on my Watch Instantly queue, so I can't complain. I like the focus on indie film and documentaries, and the addition of Starz content is a nice plus. Picture quality, under ideal conditions, is great. There are even a small number of films available in high-def, including a few films that were already near the top of my list, like the new John Sayles movie Honeydripper. No one would confuse the picture quality with Blu-Ray, but I was impressed. But again, that's under ideal circumstances. Which means before 6 PM or after midnight. During the peak evening movie-viewing window, I go from four-bars quality (the best), to three or two bars. I stopped watching one movie, the quality was so bad. I don't know if this is because my cable internet connection is slowing down on my end or if Netflix's servers are being hammered (I suspect the former), but it's disappointing. But for the most part, even the lower-quality streams are acceptable, and when all goes well, it's DVD quality or better. And it looks like Netflix just renewed it's deal with the BBC, a lot of their stuff that was scheduled to expire at the end of the month no longer is, so that's a plus; it looks like I'll still have time to watch Yes, Prime Minister once I finally finish watching Yes, Minister.

Final Fantasy XIII coming to Xbox 360. My god. This is the best news ever. This saves me close to $500. Well, no, I guess it only saves me the $400 I would have paid for a PS3, since I still need to pay for the game itself, regardless of system. But yes, I would have bought a PS3 just to play Final Fantasy. Just like I got my first Sony system, the original Playstation, just to play Final Fantasy. And just like I got a PS2 just to play Final Fantasy. And if I hadn't already had one, I would have bought a DS to play the Final Fantasy remakes. So this is great news to me. No need to overcome my strong desire for Sony to fail and buy a PS3 (Sony called the Wii an expensive niche product today, even though it's sold more units and costs less than the PS3. Now that they don't even have a Final Fantasy exclusive, what is the PS3? Expensive without a niche?)

And as reports come in, it looks like the release will be day-and-date with the PS3 release. Holy fuckin' shit, indeed. Honestly, did this leak out at all? I hadn't heard any Final Fantasy XIII port rumors in a long time, am I just not following the video game blogs as obsessively as I should? Or did my inattention actually make this happen?

Other than that, nothing too groundbreaking, but some cool stuff still came out from Microsoft's E3 presentation. Portal: Still Alive coming to the Xbox arcade, pretty much a port of the original Portal, with a few extra levels. This would have been exciting at launch, had it spared me purchasing the Orange Box just to get Portal, but too late for that now. I'll probably buy it again, though, as long as they add a reasonable amount of new content to the single-player mode (new online modes don't interest me). A massively-multiplayer online version of 1 Vs. 100 has the potential to be awesome, especially with real prizes on the line. And at last the Netflix partnership we all knew was in place is official; I'd be more excited if I wasn't already streaming Netflix Watch Instantly to my Xbox with an unofficial plugin, but it will be nice to have an official solution that actually works well (vmcNetflix is great, but freezes up a lot).

But, yeah. Final Fantasy XIII. Wow. I've been getting bored with these big new product presentations, like the last couple Apple announcements, because there's no surprises. And then, bam, Final Fantasy XIII goes multi-platform. Amazing. I recently started playing the original Final Fantasy, with the intention of playing through the entire series. Now that will be a lot cheaper to pull off.

Ticket to Ride vs. Ticket to Ride vs. Ticket to Ride. Once the novelty of Grand Theft Auto IV wore off, I've found myself getting my video game fix playing Catan virtually exclusively. But with the release of Ticket to Ride, that's where most of my video game time is now being channeled. I think long-term I'll stick with Catan, but Ticket to Ride is certainly addictive. Especially the neat little train graphic that reveals your final score. Unlike Catan, I've never played Ticket to Ride in its original board game format, but I imagine scoring might be a minor nuisance (not as bad as Carcassonne, I'm sure). But since it's release last week, a day has not passed when I did not play multiple games of Ticket to Ride (I've gotten in a few rounds of Catan, too). It helps that a game is relatively short, 15 minutes or so playing off-line. I'm sure online play probably doubles the time needed; I haven't played yet online, I wanted to get the basics down pat, first.

One complaint I have, is I have lost multiple games because I got colors confused. Nothing's worse than saving up red cards and suddenly realize you're trying to build an orange line. Ditto purple and blue. I notice they mention this at the above-linked review, so it might be an issue above and beyond my color-blindness. Early on, I also made some mistakes about city locations; the name of the city would appear right above a dot, and I wouldn't realize until it was too late that the label actually applied to the dot towards the left. But I soon got that figured out, and even the color issues aren't as bad now that I'm aware of the problem, and since the colors are static, I've pretty much memorized the more troublesome routes. Catan, to its credit, has a color-blind mode, optional offline and standard to ranked online matches, which helps me out.

But yeah, if you have an Xbox 360, check out both games, if you haven't already. I always feel a little silly, having bought an expensive video game console, only to spend most of my time playing simple board games on it. But they're hella fun, and Catan in particular is brilliantly executed, and the computer AI makes for a skilled opponent, mostly.

As I just mentioned in my last post, I am looking forward to the digital distribution of media reaching critical mass. But while I wait, I've been making inroads into controlling my media library on my computer. I recently purchased a 1TB external hard drive, and have begun digitizing my movie collection for use on my iPhone and elsewhere.

For those who haven't tried this, I should mention that it's not like ripping a CD in iTunes. The conversion process takes time; on my old clunker of a computer, it takes almost twice as long go convert a movie into H.264 as it does to watch it. So for the most part, I've just been converting one movie at a time, overnight. And sometimes Handbrake (the program I'm using for the task) freezes up in the process, and I have to start over (again, I have an old computer ill-suited for such modern tasks). So it's a somewhat frustrating task. But the end result is well worth it. I've been impressed with the visual quality of the final product, and especially the audio quality. I digitized some concert DVDs; since I've always found music on DVD to be inconvenient, I rarely watch my music video DVDs, so I figured putting them on my iPhone would breathe new life into them. They look good, but the audio fidelity was what really surprised me, sounding as good as anything probably can on the standard iPhone headphones.

So I've been happy with the results of my digitization project. Trying to get the videos onto my TV has been more frustrating. I have an Xbox 360, and so should be able to stream media via Windows Media Player 11. But despite setting everything up correctly, my Xbox 360 couldn't recognize my computer. After much tinkering, I gave up. But last night, I wanted to watch MST3K while playing poker online, so I wanted to get the show off my computer and onto the TV. So I decided to take another stab at getting WMP 11 to work with my Xbox 360. But upon booting up the software and the Xbox, I found it was now working fine. So all I had to do was set up the WMP library, and I'd be all set. Unfortunately, WMP sucks ass, so it was another two hours or so before I finally got the library under control. But I was watching MST3K on my TV (not playing poker, as Poker Stars turned out to be having issues with sit-and-go tourneys).

So far, so good. But the program I was watching was an, um, archival copy found online, in Divx. WMP didn't have a problem with that. But I'm creating my library in H.264, since that's what the iPhone plays nice with. WMP doesn't natively support the format, but plug-ins are readily available to permit playback. But even with the plug-in, you can't add H.264 files to the WMP library. I've found workarounds online, but one seems rather cumbersome, requiring multiple programs and modifications to the registry, and the other being simpler, but consisting of merely changing the file extension, which would interfere with iTunes, which is where I primarily use the files.

So I've given up on streaming H.264 files to my Xbox 360. When I want to watch a movie in that format, I'll just copy it to my portable USB hard drive, and plug that into my Xbox. Should work fine, but from past experience, I expect some glitch to arise.

So what's my point? Mainly, I'm just bitching that Microsoft seems to make this harder than it need be. But also, I wanted to point out that, even when a company like Microsoft gets their device in the home, through something like the Xbox 360, which doubles as a trojan horse for a Windows Media Extender, getting video onto a TV through these devices is too difficult for the general public, and far from mainstream. Which might be good news for Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace, but is bad news for the overall adoption of digital video.

So, my friends, I mentioned here some time ago that I purchased an Xbox 360. I've been meaning to share my reflections on the system, which are overwhelmingly positive--I really thought I was wasting my money when I bought it, but I play the Xbox much more than any other gaming system I own, with only the Nintendo DS even coming close. But I've never bothered to write a review of the system or anything, because it always occurs to me that the limited time I have to devote to video games would be best spent playing video games, not prattling on about them on some unread blog.

But you'll be pleased to know I'll have lots of time to write about the Xbox 360, because I won't be playing mine; yes, if you're at all knowledgeable about the system, you've probably already guessed, but for the rest of you: this evening, I started up the system to play one last round of Guitar Hero II before bed, to discover the Red Ring of Death. Three red lights around the power button which indicates a general hardware failure. I knew about Microsoft's billion-dollar warranty extention to cover the Red Ring of Death, and intellectually I knew it was almost a certainty the console would fail at some point, but still in my heart I believed it only happend to bad people, who sold poisoned milk to schoolchildren. But now it happened to me. So I'll be without Stuntman: Ignition, Lumines Live and Guitar Hero II for the forseeable future. But hey, that just means more time for Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii (and yes, the game's just as awesome as everyone says).

My controller has never seemed to work quite right, so I'm going to get that fixed while I'm at it.

Viva Pinata coming to the Nintendo DS. Quite interesting, seeing as Rare, developer of Viva Pinata, is owned by Microsoft. Though as Microsoft is not yet in the handheld videogame market, partnering with Nintendo isn't too strange.

Viva Pinata was heavily influential in my decision to purchase an Xbox 360, as a game which proved there was more to the console than first-person shooters. I must admit, I haven't been playing Viva Pinata much, mostly because it's a very difficult game. I think I need to start my garden over, with more careful planning, and fencing to keep pinatas from fighting (good fences make good pinatas). But it is a very cute game, perhaps too difficult for the kids that make up the target demographic, but then little kids probably don't care if they get every variety of pinata, and will enjoy watching them fight. And who doesn't enjoy watching two Whirlms doin' it?

E3, the big (though scaled-down this year) video game convention, is this week, and by now Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have all had their keynote addresses. Nothing of note announced by Sony, that I can tell (PSP slim, Home can run on a mobile phone). But I paid more attention to Microsoft and Nintendo, since I own their platforms.

Microsoft didn't announce anything too earth-shattering (nor did Nintendo...it was all rather underwhelming). The Halo-themed Xbox 360 looks like ass. Scene-It is coming to the console, which is being met mostly with jokes about the bundled controllers. I think it actually looks interesting, especially if the controllers are utilized with other trivia games (You Don't Know Jack for the Live Arcade, anyone?). But their biggest announcement was probably the arrival of Disney movies to the Live Marketplace, in HD. I have yet to rent a movie via the download service. I'll probably try it out sometime (I noticed today that The Fountain is available in HD, though other movies I'd really like to see in HD, like Pan's Labyrinth, are only available in standard-definition), but the service strikes me as a questionable value proposition. $6 to rent a HD movie is a tad steep, methinks. I'll stick to Netflix and standard-definition DVDs on my upscaling DVD player. HD is nice, but as long as its widescreen, I don't see the reason to pay $6/movie, when I'm not paying Netflix much more for a month's worth of unlimited (essentially) movies (albeit without instant gratification).

Nintendo's press conference also wasn't earth-shattering, though they did announce Mario Kart Wii, and confirmed release dates in 2007 for the big three (Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, and Super Smash Brothers Brawl). They finally revealed the Wii Zapper, but I'll have to learn more about how it's utilized before I make the plunge (I'm not buying it unless it lets me shoot that snickering Duck Hunt dog). But the big announcement on the Nintendo front was regarding Wii Health Pack, now called WiiFit. It will apparently come bundled with a pressure-sensitive pad that can measure your weight, center of gravity, and movement, while putting you through a series of exercises. I think this is absolutely awesome. I loved the concept of EyeToy: Kinetic, a PlayStation 2 exercise game which used a camera attachment to put you in the game, but ridiculous lighting requirements and other limitations of the camera made it an exercise in futility (hee-hee). So it remains to be seen if WiiFit works well, but I have very high hopes for this game.

So that's my summary of what looked to me like the big news of E3. Nothing major, but just enough to make me feel like I'm getting my money's worth from both the Wii and Xbox 360. I do intend to write a review of my Xbox 360, now that I've had it a few months, but that will wait for another day.

Xbox 360's warranty extended for three years in cases of "red ring of death." Reliability issues were one of the reasons I was slow to purchase a unit, and I'm still a bit leery that my system could crash at any moment, but knowing my warranty now extends to 2010 gives me peace of mind.

In other video game news, word has leaked out that the Playstation 3 will be getting a price cut to be announced in scant weeks. Not that I'll be getting one, but I'm sure some people will be happy.

I'm a hoarder. For most of my life, it was books. I am quite certain, when I one day shuffle off this mortal coil, the majority of books in my library will be unread, at least by me. But this is hardly uncommon. And quite affordable; a good chunk of my library was purchased used, and with the exception of a few handsome volumes, none were very expensive.

My attention shifted, a bit, with the advent of DVD. I suppose I could be considered an early adopter of DVD, if you consider anyone who owned a DVD player pre-PS2 to be an early adopter. But the idea of special features and audio commentaries intrigued me, and I took the plunge on what was still a fairly pricey player. But the sticker shock was softened by the fact that the internet boom was in full swing, and internet merchants were more then willing to drastically cut prices on DVDs to try to move some players. I remember ordering lots of DVDs from 800.com (now owned by Circuit City, apparently) at well under $10 each, free shipping, and often getting microwave popcorn or Red Vines thrown into the package as a nice bonus. So, forming a video library wasn't too expensive, either. In fact, I used to argue to myself that it was cheaper than renting, because I could keep it as long as I wanted, watch it, and sell it on half.com to recoup a reasonable part of my investment.

But I never did sell them. And I probably only watched three or four movies a month, along with a few TV shows on DVD. And as my interests tended to run towards TV show boxed sets and Criterion Collection releases of classic foreign films, this became a rather expensive hoarding. So I gradually put the breaks on my DVD spending. And I suppose, all this time, I was also assembling what seemed, for the most part, a ridiculous CD library, as well. But like books, this is hardly uncommon, nor terribly expensive. And while most of these CDs were rarely listened to for most of my life, the advent of the iPod and iTunes means that the vast majority of this library (I have yet to finish digitizing all my CDs) is available anytime, anywhere, and as a result, this lifetime's accumulation of music is actually being used to something close to its full potential.

Like I said, I consider myself a hoarder. I'm not a collector, really, because I have no object in what I purchase; I'm not trying to get rare books or CDs or DVDs, necessarily. And since I never actually use a large percentage of what I obtain, I can't really say I'm an enthusiast. I think my purchases relate to my gambling; if I ever stop to think I might be wasting money, I just remind myself how much I lost on one hand of blackjack on a recent occasion, and then I feel ridiculous for ever questioning the expenditure.

Anyway, I tell you this to explain my most recent purchase. Ever since I slowed down my DVD purchases extensively, I've found myself purchasing quite a few electronic devices. I'm on my third iPod, I've purchased several upgrades for my computer (which I have been forced to admit were, due to the fundamental limitations of my antiquated system, pretty much useless), a Wii and Nintendo DS Lite, an HDTV, a PDR (which now sits mostly unused as I'm also renting one from the cable company), an upscaling DVD player to complement the new HDTV, among others. Now, for the most part, I'm getting quite a bit of use out of these products. But I really had to question my desire to supplement the Nintendo products, and my old PS2 (I'm currently on my second) and my now obsolete Gamecube, with an Xbox 360. Yet in what can only be described as a bizarre compulsion, compounded by the siren-call of Viva Pinata and Settlers of Catan, I purchased an Xbox 360 on Thursday.

If this weekend is any indication, the Xbox 360 will not be one of these products that simply contributes to the quantity of stuff I own, but will be something I actually use. The games look fantastic (especially Viva Pinata), and I've had a lot of fun growing my garden in that game. But the main reason I wanted an Xbox was to access the Xbox Live Arcade, and play some of the games there. This week's release of Settlers of Catan was one of the reasons I finally took the plunge and got the system, but so far, I've just stuck with the games that came with Xbox Arcade Unplugged, a collection of a few of the more popular games for the service. Geometry Wars is okay, as are most of the other games I've tried. I've played a fair amount of Backgammon, though I've had trouble finding opponents online (I thought it might not be a popular game, but I think it may be the result of technical difficulties). But, degenerate gambler that I am, I've clocked the most hours playing Texas Hold 'em. It's actually pretty well-implemented, for a fake-money poker game. Playing in tournament mode, you only have a limited amount of money to pay the entry fees. In many games, if you run out of money, they just refresh your bankroll. In this game, if you lose your money, you have to grind out a new bankroll playing free tournaments for limited prize money. As a result, people seem to play a bit more reasonably than they do in other free poker games. And while I worried the voice support would mean dealing with a lot of assholes, for the most part its just friendly banter, and there's always the option to mute an annoying player.

Of course, all that sidesteps the larger issue, which is, did I just lay down a significant amount of money to play poker and backgammon on my TV? And the answer, really, is yes. I've enjoyed Viva Pinata and look forward to playing Crackdown and Dead Rising and Oblivion and other games that fully utilize the impressive hardware I just purchased. But I think, at heart, I lean more towards what the market classifies a "casual gamer." So I'm comfortable playing Bejewelled on my HDTV, even if it a bit like driving a porshe to the market. And I think, in the long run, I'll spend some quality time with some of the more intensive games for the system (though my aversion to first-person shooters rules out some of its most popular games).

I'll discuss Viva Pinata later, along with my feelings on any other games I might want to mention. For now, I've rambled on long enough. Just wanted to let you know I'm now a member of the Wii60 demographic. And I think I'll try to curb my electronic purchases a bit. Though now that I have an Xbox 360, I could really use a new computer with Vista's Media Center capabilities. And my car seems rather empty without GPS capabilities. And a new car stereo could really maximize the potential of my iPod. UPDATE: I forgot to mention one thing: I've used the Xbox 360 for about three days, and it has frozen up on me twice. My Wii has never frozen. My Nintendo DS has never frozen. My PS2 has frozen maybe two times. My original Nintendo Entertainment System used to freeze, very rarely, late in its life cycle. And again, my Xbox 360 has frozen twice in my first weekend of ownership. You can really tell it's a Microsoft product.