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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.

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.

I’ve killed my third and last palm pilot, a Clie PEG-S360. Worst part is, I have no idea how this one broke. Just pulled it out of my pocket and the screen was cracked, but alas I must mourn and move on.

Since the damned MPx was cancelled, I’m looking to the boring Scoble phone or sexy but unreleased Nokia N91 to satisfy my convergance hunger.

Scoble, you won, and don’t worry the Tablet PC’s not invisible, at least not to me. You see, I’m the new proud owner of my first TabletPC. Well, my employer owns it… but close enough. This whole post, actually, was written by hand and then converted to text in Firefox. Neat stuff, neat stuff… Stay tuned for more of my first impressions working with a tablet.

Card Club Episode 11 is ready for download. Get it via .torrent

Has anyone else had problems with Bloglines dropping PubSub entries? Many times my ‘poker’ PubSub feed will appear to contain new items in Bloglines, but when I attempt to retrieve them, no items are shown.

More Gmail invites available! This morning I noticed Gmail has given me ten new accounts to give to you this holiday season. Post a comment and I’ll send you an invite.

Also, if you have any invites you don’t know what to do with, post a message here and I’ll add them to the pool of available invites. Thanks to Chris Owens for the last round and inspiration.
No more invites here. All were given to the isnoop gmail spooler. Get them there.
Invites Available: 13
Invites Given: 3

Invite Donors: Myself, Dan Lash (6)

Ahhh… after a two day road-trip, I’m back in East Lansing and in the land of broadband. It is a Good Thing.

I always wondered how the gas pumps knew if I had enough money for the gas I was about to take. Today I found out because this morning, I attempted to renew my subscription to Everquest 2, and my transaction was denied. Having a much larger available balance on my credit card, I became quite worried as to why it wouldn’t approve. After placing a call to customer service, my creditor explained to me that the merchant had made the error and never asked for funds, so all is well with my credit account. Phew.

He then wanted to confirm the available balance I saw with the one he saw and all was well except for one thing. He asked, “Did you purchase gas from the pump on Tuesday?”

“Yes, sure did, about ten dollars worth. Is there a problem?” I replied.

He went on to explain that everything was fine, and that I should adjust my balance because when you purchase gasoline from the pump, the machine validates that your credit card has at least one dollar of credit, no more. This is immediately posted away from your available balance, but the actual amount of money spent isn’t requested from your creditor until after a few days. So, you actually pay $1 to pump the gas, and pay the rest later. Go fig.

It is very important that you vote today. Please do.

Remember the Apple Switch commercials with testimonies of people in a white room? Well, Errol Morris did a set of switch commercials for the Kerry campaign.

The ads that resonate with me the most are as follows.

• Lee Buttrill, US Marine who served in Iraq, speaking on Weapons of Mass Destruction.
• Brady Van Matre, a contracter speaking on the economy.
• Bob Scott on honesty of the administration.

By way of Boing Boing.

I’d greatly appreciate it if you went to this website to help me get a free iPod. If you’re worried about the legitimacy of the site, read this testimony from Wired magazine. All you need to do is complete the trial offer to help me out and you don’t have to email anyone if you don’t wish. In all honesty, I saw this website a while back on some forums and thought it was crap, though I’m glad to be proven wrong.

Update: I did the Columbia House DVD offer, though looking back, I should have probably done the BMG music offer. Some of the services require that you really do nothing, and can cancel them, though the CD service one looks to be the best value for least investment. Besides, it would’ve been great to get more CDs to put on the iPod…

How to tie a tie by way of Matt Mullenweg.

Why on earth do they have to preface an acronym with The? The O.C. isn’t a respectable name for a TV show, and quite frankly (i’m probably the only one) I was befuddled as to what The O.C. was when Lorin kept going on and on about it. Though, I’m quite sure that it sucks.

All I can figure is that the FOX execs decided to come up with a name that would be as vaguely descriptive of a dung heap as possible, and then give it “from the streets” feel. Also, don’t hope to get much out of the website about the show, as it seems dedicated to selling music, clothes, and ecards. No, I’m not being fair to the show, because frankly, some things don’t deserve to be considered, let alone exist.

You ruffians with your hip-hop lingo, television, and pop rocks, the future of this country is more dim than ever.