I’ve Recently Gotten an XBOX 360

I have a confession, while I’ve been a PC gamer for most my life, my wife recently purchased an XBOX for me.  Now I’ve owned other consoles, the last I really put any significant time into was a Sega Genesis.  I started out in PC gaming way back in ‘78 playing rip-offs of arcade games.

My PC gaming went though several computer generations Ohio Scientific Challenger, C64, Turbo XT, Turbo AT, etc on till I’m playing on Over-Clocked Core 2 Duo Rig that was top of the line when bought it a bit over two years ago.  My system will still play any “A'” title that I want to play and I’m still having a great deal of fun playing games on it.

So why do I have a console and spending less time PC gaming?  Well it comes down to the fact that there are games like Mass Effect, Gears of War and several other that I find interesting and they and their sequels are Console only or the PC ports frankly are not that good.  I also find the XBOX makes a great multi-media device when teamed up with a streaming server like Tversity.  I do plan on playing new titles like the upcoming Modern Warfare 2, and possibly others that look interest that are not available on the console, or their game play is better on the PC.

No Unreal Tournament “For Several Years”

I’m a bit disappointed by Tim Sweeney’s remark in an interview with G4tv that there are no plans to release a new version of Unreal Tournament in the near future.

While I was not a big fan of the original Unreal Tournament (I was into Decent 3 and Quake II online at the time), I did like UT2K3 and UT2K4, and think they messed it up in UT3 when they toned down the game play and seriously messed up the weapons balance.

The people I played with loved the acrobatics and the jumps you could do and were totally pissed at how “grounded” the characters were in UT3.  The other thing disappointing were that they reduced the damage that skill based weapons like the lighting gun (replaced by sniper rifle) and shock rifle did.  The problem was that they made things more “noob” & console friendly by upping the damage of the rockets and flac.  I think that it would have been much better received if thay had not tried to make a story out of the basic game modes … CTF to shut down the enemies' spawners … give me a break.

Now don’t get me totally wrong the Warfare mode was nice as I was always a fan of Onslaught and the VCTF was pretty solid if a very limited selection of maps.  But obviously most players that were playing UT2K4 did not find UT3 very compelling and most that I knew went to other games after UT2K4 lost it’s appeal for them.

I had hoped that Epic would make a tweaked version of UT3 (UT3.5) where they brought back the bounciness and life of the prior games, similar to what they did to UT2K3 to add content and fix things the community wanted.  The Titan bonus pack, while it was an attempt to bring life to UT3, ended up making the game even less appealing to players of previous versions.

Wow, long time no post

It’s been almost a year since I’ve last posted on my blog … apparently nothing has made me really want to post.

I’ve been playing a lot of games (WaW, COD4, Gears, Plants vs Zombies).  My favorite game and a great time sink every time I try it is Plants vs Zombies … simple but addictive.

Other things I’ve been playing with is Windows 7, I’ve actually been fairly well impressed, and I am using the RC on several PCs at home.  This is the first version of Windows I’ve been excited about since Windows 95, I’ve actually pre-ordered one copy, though I may cancel it if the family pack of 3 PCs for $130 actually pans out.