A Green Mushroom

I had a lunch meeting so I'm a little behind on E3 today, but I just blasted through the Microsoft conference and have a couple minutes to write before the EA conference starts. It was a solid showing, but not enough to get me to buy an Xbox One.  There are a lot of games that are interesting to me, but most of them are on both Xbox One and PC.  I much prefer to use my monster of a gaming PC instead of spending more money on hardware I don't need.  It seems like I won't miss out on too much. The Xbox One exclusives that did  interest me are Halo 5 and Thieves of the Sea.  Halo 5 is fairly self explanatory, but I really liked the ODST vibe it gave off.  That has always been my favorite Halo game.  Thieves of the Sea looks like a sweet stylized pirate MMO that I would play in a heartbeat if it were on PC, but for the moment it's staying as a Xbox One exclusive. They showcased a lot of games and hardware announcements, I'm still kinda decompressing....

This was my weekend accomplishment.  After fearing that I would have to pay upwards of a couple hundred bucks for a new Xbox 360 I decided to do some home repairs.  Things went fairly smoothly thanks to helpful advice and diagrams on the internet. The problem was a dirty laser head, which is what I was expecting.  All I had to do was lightly rub the laser head with a q-tip a few times.  Then I fired it up and the system started reading discs perfectly again.  The sad thing is this would cost at least $100 and 2-3 weeks of time if I sent it to Microsoft and they did the exact same thing. The case was annoying, but after taking apart the plastic layer on the outside the rest of the process was simple enough.  A gaming console is just a specific type of computer, so if you've ever built or upgraded your own hardware you would feel right at home with the innards of a modern console.  If you have problems and are out of warranty like I am, don't be a...

Halo Reach is being unleashed on the gaming community in the near future.  Somehow it's kind of fallen off  my radar, but the release date is coming up so it's time to figure out if I plan on buying it. You see, I own all the Halo games and have gotten most of them on release day, but this year I have a baby on the way and money is a little more tight, so I really need to consider a new game before I go drop $60 on it. My main concern is that Halo has already been done to death.  Since Halo: Combat Evolved (the first game in the series) Halo hasn't changed all that much.  They designed the Golden Triangle of melee, guns, and grenades in a first person shooter and each iteration of the series from that point on has only introduced minor tweaks or graphics upgrades.  Besides breaking multiplayer balance in Halo 2 the games are all very similar. For the most part Halo Reach looks like more of the same.  The improvements this time around are more units ...

I've always wanted to go to E3, but since I'm not a professional game journalist I'll have to make do with blogs and livestreams of events as they happen this week.  I spent the morning watching the Microsoft press conference online and was impressed with the Natal which is now called the Kinect. The cameras see everything... everything. Control over my console without a controller?  Yes, please.  I hope the voice command pause/play works for all types of media and not just when in the Zune store.  I stream videos stored on my PC hard drive to my 360 almost every day.  If I can control those with my voice or hand motions I'll be very happy.  If the functionality is confined to only a few applications within the 360 I'll be sorely disappointed.  Time will tell. Video chatting via Xbox is pretty cool.  The camera automatically following me as I move around the room is pretty creepy.  So there's some balance I guess. They kicked off the...

With the PS3's new motion control, the Move, trying to take over GDC headlines I started thinking about the direction motion controllers are going. In the next year all three consoles will have a motion controller.  The PS3 and the Wii have similar handheld devices while the Xbox 360 will use multiple cameras to detect the player's body. The PS3 looks to have more accuracy than the Wii and it is also able to gauge distance, which the Wii cannot.  This is important because the PS3 may be able to give gamers 1:1 control, something that has never happened before.  Imagine swinging a controller and having your avatar swing a sword on-screen in exactly the same way . The 360 is trying to go one step beyond this.  Project Natal gives players motion controls without having a controller in hand.  This, too, may allow gamers to experience 1:1 control.  Without the necessity of a complex controller the 360 may also start to appeal to a more casual audience....