Digital Alterity

I’m in a game-playing cycle right now.

My interests/obsessions tend to move in rapidly shifting cycles. For weeks, I’ll want to do nothing except read manga, and then I’ll suddenly shift to playing Battle For Middle Earth 2 on my Xbox 360. People not used to the enthusiasm with which geeks tend to devour our current interests are often confused and frightened by the level of single-minded dedication we can display. But honestly, if you watch us over a long enough period of time, you’ll see that we’re actually pretty well-rounded; you just have to change your scope.

I continue to be obsessed with comics (especially super hero comics), but beyond my comics (which only show up at my office every other week), I want to just fill all of my free time up with playing games on the computer. When I’m not playing World of Warcraft, I want to be playing Warcraft 3. I’m enjoying the hell out of interactive entertainment basically.

The dilemma of the day comes in when I think about what I brought to do on my lunch break. I’m reading through Lies My Teacher Told Me, a book about the teaching of American history, and while the book continues to be pretty interesting, I find myself thinking only about how much more fun I could be having if I had brought my laptop or my PSP with me. I’m sure my book will be a fine way to occupy my lunch break, but I’m halfway tempted to just listen to comics podcasts instead.

Basically, I feel just like this.

I had just finished reading my comics for the week, and Mighty Avengers #5 had me in the mood for some Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the 360. When I loaded up my Avengers team save file, I decided that I was going to switch out Hawkeye for Ms. Marvel, but as I flipped on the character screen, the system crashed.

Now this isn’t really that unusual. My Xbox 360 has been routinely choking on Oblivion for weeks now. I turned it off, and expected to be greeted by a happier Xbox when I flipped it back on. Frozen load screen. Controller not being recognized. Red ring of death with a missing light in the upper-right quadrant. Massive hardware failure.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!

I spent the rest of the night in a daze. My Xbox. Was. Broken. For the first time in nearly a year, I couldn’t play Marvel Ultimate Alliance. This was (and perhaps is) more than I could handle.

Thankfully, Microsoft has extended the Xbox 360 warranty for three years because of the high rate of red ring of death failures. So I should get a new Xbox for free, but that will probably take a week or so. In the interim, I hardly know what to do with myself.

Technorati Tags: Xbox 360, Red Ring of Death

Allyson and I have finally joined the cult of Wii. We picked up the Wii on something of a calculated whim over the weekend. After my haircut on Sunday, I said, “Why don’t we see if Toys R Us has any Wiis?”

I say this about every Sunday, you see, as kind of a joke. One day, I was thinking about getting one, and there was this weird line at Toys R Us over an hour before they opened. Almost all of the people in line resembled underground mole people. We left to go to the bookstore for an hour and came back in time for the store to open. When the doors opened people went insane, literally running for the counter. Ever since this day, I’ve said that I won’t buy a Wii until I can just randomly walk in and buy one off the shelf.

So yesterday, we walked in to Toys R Us, and Allyson said, “There they are!”
“Well, I was totally unprepared for that.”
“Are you getting one?”
“I don’t know. Can I?”
“I figured we would get one eventually.”

So we got a Wii and Wii Play so that we could have a second controller.

Want to add me as a friend? My friend code is:

2286 5358 1143 6398

Just throw your friend code in the comments or shoot me an email.

Technorati Tags: Wii, Friend Code, Nintendo

I’ll admit that I’m pretty intrigued by Sony’s announcement of a new PSP design. Those of you who have been reading for a good long while will remember the period when I desperately wanted one. At the time, my reasons revolved around the ability to put my French in Action videos or TV show episodes on it so that I could watch them away from the house—something that my new iPod did just fine. This new model, however, will have the ability to display on the TV set, a feature that made me fall in love with the Game Boy Player add-on for the Game Cube.

I have been toying off and on with picking up a PSP so that I could play their exclusive characters for Marvel Ultimate Alliance (1), but this makes me just want to wait until I can evaluate the delivered features of this new model. I just hope that they don’t make it too much smaller and slimmer. Even though, I couldn’t live without the DS Lite’s brighter screen, I vastly preferred the form factor of the original Nintendo DS.

Footnotes

1. When have Hawkeye on the Xbox 360 DLC, but I still haven’t been able to play as Black Widow, Captain Marvel, and Ronin.

My video game time has been completely dominated lately by ports of board games on Xbox Live Arcade. I’ve been playing little else beyond the occasional game of Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

It all started with Uno. Uno is one of those games that I actually have fond memories of playing with my family as a child, but I didn’t actually buy it on the Marketplace until about a month ago. Since that time, this has been the default game of choice for Jason and I to play over Xbox Live. I play against strangers on Live occasionally, but I learned very early on to just shut off the video feeds from other players. In fact, I never even plug in my headset because most people on Live are absolute sucktards. However, if you have a buddy that you like gaming with, this is the perfect game to play in the background while you chat away over your headset.

Jason and I downloaded Catan next, and that game absolutely consumed our free time for weeks. I had never actually played the board game version of this, but I noticed that they do sell it and several expansions at the comic shop. Catan is a strategy game, but it doesn’t require a long time to play. It feels light and fun even when I’m losing.

For my birthday, Jason got me a copy of the Marvel Trading Card Game for the DS, and I spent the next day and a half trying desperately to understand what the hell was going on. I didn’t understand the interface. I didn’t understand the rules. I spent a lot of time losing over and over again. Then I watched the online Flash demo for the VS system on Upperdeck’s web site, and everything suddenly made a lot more sense. I’ve been playing this on lunch breaks ever since.

Last weekend, Jason emailed me about Carcassonne, another board game/strategy game on Xbox Live Arcade. Since downloading it, it’s pretty much the only game on my Xbox. Yet again, the game is light, not time consuming, and a ridiculous amount of fun. The predetermined amount of tiles in each game makes for a game with a pretty established time investment. I can know in advance when I pick up the controller before work that I really will have time to finish my game before it’s time to leave the house.

I love deep, engrossing console RPGs with sweeping storylines, but sometimes I just want somethings light and fun, a gentle gaming sorbet to cleanse the palette. If you have some extra XBL points, throw one of these great games on your system.

Technorati Tags: Xbox 360, Xbox Live, Carcassonne, Catan, Uno, Marvel Trading Card Game, Nintendo DS

I was most displeased that the Marvel Ultimate Alliance downloadable content wasn’t released on Xbox Live this week.

“Where the hell is my Marvel Ultimate Alliance downloadable content, bub?”

Technorati Tags: Comics, Marvel Ultimate Alliance

Anyone who has seem the Xbox 360 power brick knows that the thing sucks a lot of power out of the wall. The thing practically has its own ZIP code. I wanted to know, in practical terms, how much the hours playing Battle for Middle Earth II and Viva Piñata were costing me.

I dug up some video game console power usage estimates and used the Xbox 360 estimate of 165 W. Assuming I play for an average of three hours every night, we can estimate that I will use 180.675 kWh/year. My utilities company uses graduated pricing and a variable rate fuel surcharge, but we’ll use a convenient estimate of $0.10/kWh. This means that it will take about $18.07/year ($1.51/month) to play my Xbox 360.

But this is only half the story really. I have a 32-inch CRT HDTV. Digging up the values, from my owner’s manual, I see that it uses 180 W. At the same rate of 3 hours/day of gaming, we can estimate that my TV will use 197.1 kWh/year, which figures up to about $19.71/year ($1.64/month).

Aren’t CRTs big energy hogs though? Could I lower the amount by switching to an LCD or Plasma? I took a look at a couple of Samsung HDTVs and ran some numbers. The plasmas I looked at were all in the 400-500 W range, so I chose a convenient TD with a 450 W usage. This figures up to 492.75 kWh/year and a cost of $49.28/year just to play Xbox for 3 hours/day. An LCD HDTV with the same 32-inch size as my CRT would be a little less. The Samsung LN-S3251D uses 165 W leading to the exact same values as the Xbox 360 itself—180.675 kWh/year and $18.07/year. However, a 40-inch LCD HDTV (Samsung LN-S4051D) uses more power at 218 W. This yields a yearly usage of 238.71 kWh/year and an annual cost of $23.87/year.

To give these numbers a bit of persecptive, though, consider these figures. An electric oven pulls down about 5000 W. A clothes dryer sucks up 5000 W. A 2.5-ton central AC unit burns 3500 W.

Technorati Tags: Xbox 360, Energy, Power, Electricity

My local EB Games got their shipment of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin in today, and I got to pick up my pre-order copy of the 20th Anniversary set. The art book is beautiful and full of nostalgia-inducing scenes from Rusty’s childhood, and the CD of game music is worth the price I paid for the whole gift set. I haven’t even opened the game yet, and the purchase is still oh so worth it.

Why haven’t I put Portrait of Ruin into the DS yet? Because out of the blue, Allyson told me I could buy a game on Monday, and I chose Final Fantasy 3. Castlevania games should be savored like fine wine. I might spend my lunch break with it tomorrow.

Castlevania release days are like having a second Halloween in the year.

Technorati Tags: Video Games, Nintendo, Nintendo DS, Castlevania

The Xbox 360 has changed not just the way I play video games but also the way that I think about life. The Achievements system whereby you earn “gamer points” for doing cool things in various games acts as tangible reward for casual gamers like me to prove that we did in fact accomplish something during our time on the couch.

The trouble comes in when you step away from the couch and realize that you don’t earn any achievements away from the Xbox 360. If I clean the kitchen, I don’t add any points to my “husband score”. If I solve a tricky problem for the boss, I don’t get an increase in “worker score”.

Between Achievements and the awarding of Spark Points over at the Spark People health web site, I’ve come to expect some sort sort of numerical reward for just about everything I do.

Maybe I need to add a Bactroid.net score to our profiles. Post a ChangeLog? Points. Update your status on consecutive days? Points. Redesign problematic code? Lots of points.

Technorati Tags: Accomplishments, Xbox 360, Achievements

Okay, I’ll admit it. I didn’t hold out long, but selective willpower is an advantage, not a detriment. On Friday I ran some budgetary numbers and determined that I will have enough money saved up for an Xbox 360 and accompany necessities by the time the next credit card payment is due. On Saturday, I bought an Xbox 360 (not the “Core” system Xbox Three-Shitty), a wireless adapter (so that I wouldn’t have to string 15-30 m of ethernet cable through my apartment), and a copy of Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II. I’ve theoretically got a $40 mail-in rebate on the Xbox, but we’ll see if that money ever actually turns up.

Should you need/want to find me on Xbox Live, my gamer tag is Bactroid. Right now, BFME2 is the only game I have, and since I’m still paying for everything, it will be the only game I’ll be playing for a while. I’m always happy to offer myself as a sacrificial lamb though.

Oh, and let me say that Hexic HD is like sweet crack cocaine. I can’t get enough.

Technorati Tags: Video Games, Commerce, Xbox 360, Gamertag