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I’ve spent a lot of time gaming in the last three months, and it seems that gamers like myself have been particularly blessed with an abundance of high-quality gaming options. In fact, I’ve been so involved, I’ve neglected informing you, gentle reader, as to what is hot-or-not.

Dead Or Alive 4
The best and only fighter fix you can currently get on the 360. It fills that void well, but not perfectly. Fast is fun. Questionable character balance. Hit or miss level design and graphical quality. Many of the outdoor levels are stunning, while some of the indoor levels are wholly uninspired.

Project Gotham Racing 3
Slightly improved gameplay over predecessors which translates to a safely fun and generic racing game. Online community is great, and the graphics are amazing. A solid (if timid) multiplayer local or online game. I think Ferrari was unnaturally favored by the developers. Next version will be, “Project Ferrari Racing*”. Seriously, too much Ferrari love.

Call of Duty 2
Multiplayer sucks. Needed two patches to even make it playable with friends. Oozes atmosphere because of the authentic sound and well designed and varied mission objectives. The AI is frustrating when they decide to do run in front of your firing weapon, causing the mission to end. Veteran is hard but beatable, be warned.

Perfect Dark Zero
Meh. Not bad, but everything else is so much more enticing.

Playstation Portable
Double meh. Going back to Liberty City is fun, but the DS keeps stealing my attention.

Mario Kart DS
Best kart racing, evar. Better than any MK to date. Highly addictive. Missions are great addition.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike
This light turn based strategy game is the most fun I’ve had since Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

Guitar Hero
Rocked, partied, loved it. Sharing the love by lending to a friend was done to allow me to focus on playing other games. Highly addictive and satisfying. Everybody loves it, even non gamer friends.

Marble Blast Ultra
Impulse buy for the win. Everyone loves to armchair coach this game. Damn Microsoft Points! They’re *like* free money!

Geometry Wars
2d crack. I suck, but still love this game. My high score isn’t even above 1 million. One day….

For the record, I have copies of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, Burnout Revenge, and Metroid Prime Hunters. I am toast.

*coined elsewhere, though a quick search doesn’t show where I originally read it.

I’ve put off writing about the Xbox 360 mainly because I am overwhelmed by the intricacies of the system. That isn’t to say the box is complicated, as in fact, quite the opposite is true. My tardiness is because I have a difficult time expressing the weight of the realization that one day I may indeed never be required to leave my couch again.

This is the chain of events that led to that epiphany.

I picked up the controller. I turned on the console. I raced my Ferrari F50 GT in Project Gotham, talked with my friends, listened to my own music, all at once, yet I was the only one in the room. I was done playing games, so watched some old recorded episodes of Family Guy. I realized that I was a half an hour late to turn on the hockey game, so I started watching it… from the beginning. I watched replays when the TV network showed none. The Detroit Red Wings lost to the Calgary Flames, and I cried. To comfort myself, I played Kameo, got sleepy, shut off the console, and set down the controller.

Notice what is absent from that last paragraph. I did not have to use other remotes, cable boxes, tapes, or VCRs. I used the controller, the *entire* time. The only times my buttocks left the cushion was when I fetched a beer, and when I changed the game disc from Project Gotham 3 to Kameo.

Be warned though, that the true gravitational power of the couch for any Xbox 360 owner is directly linked to whether or not they own a Media Center. If such isn’t the case, you’ll be forced to commit such banal acts as setting down your controller for another remote, watching commercials, braving the cable guide, exempting yourself from watching Intarweb videos on your TV, and other lewd and reprehensible acts.

Ok, enough of that. Next up: Kameo reviews and the little things about the 360 that make it clear that the day our consoles cook and serve food is still far far away…

I just received an email from Larry Hyrb, Director of Programming for Xbox Live!

Sorry Tor, for many reasons from business to technical, ripping of game titles to the Xbox 360 hard drive is not a scenario or feature we can support.

I get the business side of it, but not the technical. I guess I could go on and on and whine about it but I still can’t think of any problems that aren’t solvable here, especially not because of the technology. Case-in-point: Steam rocks, and it works. Essentially, I rip PC games to the hard drive all the time.

I can however see the publishers getting very very antsy about game ripping and possibly denying all access to a net distribution service. In ten years though, I think this is going to be the norm, and publishers in their traditional role will be left in the cold or diminished severely in power.

Microsoft, court the development studios and cut the distribution channels away.

In a recent interview J Allard (via Joystiq) claimed that the featureset of the 360 was designed to make modding unattractive and obsolete.

So putting piracy aside what did most of them do? They made it a media player. They had it connect to portable devices. They had it copy my music off of my PC so I could get it here. They did visualizers. They made themes. They made it something they could actually participate in. Well, we took a lot of those great ideas and said, “You want to make a theme? We’ll give you a theme editor. Go put themes on.” You don’t have to chip your box to make your box yours. You don’t have to unscrew it to put little green lights in it. Just rip off the faceplate and go put on a theme. Because everyone wants to do a lot of what legitimate modders wanted to do.

He leaves out one major convenience of modding, and that’s ripping games to the hard drive. Please please please, let us rip our games to the hard drive. I can’t stand scratching my discs, and I’m lazy as hell when it comes to switching cds. Given that the 360 supports detachable storage devices, it would be amazing to be able to just unplug your hard drive and take all your games, savedata, and everything else to a friend’s 360. The process for ripping should be as follows.

1. User plugs in hard drive via USB 2.0 or uses standard detachable HD.
2. Inserts game to rip.
3. Selects rip game from the menu.
4. Live prompts user for login, and game key, just like Steam does.
5. (Optional) User selects rip target drive.

Microsoft has DRM, it has Live! infrastructure, and patching capability. Make this goodness happen.

Update: Better yet, just implement something like Steam on Live!. I don’t want to wait for pre-orders. I don’t want to move my lazy butt to the store on opening day, or wait out in the cold at midnight. I want to be able to play my games on any 360, and I’m sure you want the retailer’s share of current revenue for yourself.

I just pre-ordered my Xbox 360 from GameStop and supposedly it’s coming in the first shipment of consoles. I remain skeptical, but I pre-ordered anyways because the down payment is refundable should I purchase a 360 somewhere else.

The only thing of substance in last night’s Xbox 360 party was the segment on the new Perfect Dark game. I learned Perfect Dark is pretty, that’s it. Nothing else. I guess if you hadn’t heard anything about the new 360 you would have also learned:

• 360 is white.
• 360 can stand on it’s side.
• 360 has different face plates.
• 360 has wireless controllers.
• 360 can go online…

All of these factoids are unispiring or are so vauge as to border on useless. They left out all the meat, and failed to show the world anything other than “more screenshots”. Microsoft really dropped the ball.

As an aside, I’m a Scoble-whore, because I use the word Scoble in this post (forgive me). Hopefully, he’ll see this and let the responsible party at Microsoft know how badly they failed to educate and excite people about what should be their newest coolest product. You had tons of eyeballs, you had MTV, and you filled up an hour with the amount of information that could have been printed on a brochure.