Sony on the other hand had a much better showing. There was the official announcement of the PSP go, which everyone knew was coming because of all of the leaks. I’m actually not much of a portable gamer, so the PSP go doesn’t really interest me. There were also big time games such as Final Fantasy 14, God of War 3, Gran Turismo 5, and MAG.

Sony also jumped into the motion sensing game with a motion sensing controller. It actually looks a lot more accurate than the wiimote, and the tech demo they showed off was rather impressive. Just like Microsoft’s project Natal, it all depends on how developers choose to use this accessory that will determine how much of a success or flop it will be.

The true show stopper was Project Natal. The fact that people will be able to control their Xbox 360 and play games without any sort of controller is a big game changer. Although it really depends on how the technology is used. If it’s a home to a lot of crap and very few great experiences, like the Wii, then the technology will be wasted. Only time will tell how revolutionary Natal will be.

Overall, Microsoft put up a strong showing. Now Nintendo and Sony need to bring some heat.

Was it really that hard for the developers to put in a practice mode, or perhaps the option to play a friendly match with someone else online? FAIL.

The first hurdle is actually making it work. Most modern games still suffer from lag, and that’s with the game server not having to do all of the leg work of running the game itself. Some people were able to use the service and said that it worked, but that was a very controlled environment. The service will really have to perform when there are a few hundred or thousand people playing at once.

Then the issue of Internet connection stability comes up. Are people going to be willing to put up with outages on the service’s end? Or will people tolerate not being able to play simply because they’re having issues with their Internet connection?

Moreover, people are used to owning a physical copy of a game. There will certainly be a number of gamers who refuse to only have a digital copy, or merely renting games from the service. Price will also play a factor in this, especially in this turbulent economy.

Lastly, Internet service providers will also have a hand in whether OnLive fails or succeeds. A lot of ISPs are wanting to impose bandwidth caps on users, and have them pay for anything extra that they use. OnLive will be pushing a lot of data, and a user will probably blow way past some setup caps. Also, if caps aren’t in place, the service will also have to deal with possible traffic shaping from ISPs who don’t want OnLive bogging everything down.

OnLive touts itself as the future of gaming. They might be right, but it’s going to take a lot of things going very right for that to happen.

I felt the time was right to jump into the Apple side of things, especially since I can dual boot Windows Vista alongside OS X.

My first two days have been a mixture of frustration and happiness. I love the wonderful screen, but it has some gunk stuck between the glass and the LCD, meaning I’ll have to drive quite a distance to take it to an apple store to get it fixed. I’m also trying to get the hang of using OS X.

I’m still happy with the decision I made, as having OS X will let me dip my toes into developing iphone and ipod touch apps.

Age of Booty is a very casual friendly strategy game. As the name implies, it’s all about being a pirate. Players take their ships and go out scavenging for supplies, which are used to upgrade said ship. Once it’s powerful enough it’s time to go take over some towns and turn them into bases. The game is incredibly simple, but is worth checking out for those who really enjoy playing more casual stuff.

I decided to go over all of the customer service people who seemed to just brush me off, and wrote a letter directly to the president of Newegg. A few days later I got a call from the head of customer service apologizing for what had happened, and wanted to make sure I was happy.

They offered to send me a replacement, but in the end I decided to keep the current computer I was sent. It makes some pretty damn annoying noises, but it isn’t worth it for me to get a replacement after all of the time and energy I put into setting up this computer. The transferring of all of my data alone took me 3 days. I don’t have the time nor the patience to have to deal with all of that crap.

In the end I’m happy that it seems someone over at Newegg finally understood where I was coming from, and that I was royally pissed to be treated in such a way after dropping so much money.

So I no longer hate Newegg. They actually seem to have people that care about their customers. But again, I’m still waiting for one more thing to go through for their honor to be completely restored.

Things have changed in the last year or so, though. When I got my new notebook I was really dreading having to use Vista after my earlier experience with it. Once I got my new machine, the first thing I did was install Windows XP alongside Vista. After booting back and forth between the two, I discovered that I was starting to like Vista more and more.

Now that I’ve been using Vista for about 3 weeks, I’ve got to say that I really enjoy using it. Not only that, but I got rid of the Windows XP install and am strictly running Vista. There are still quite a few quirks that I wish were ironed out, but hopefully it’ll be taken care of with Windows 7.

The computer still has the exact same problems that it had when I sent it in to them. Not only that, but now one of the buttons on the computer doesn’t work. It’s a touch sensitive button that makes it easy to go through power settings.

So they basically sent it back to me in worse shape than what they received it in. Awesome work Newegg! I highly suggest that anyone looking to buy electronics stay away from Newegg. Newegg sucks!

I suggest that all of the visitors within the USA visit the site as often as possible, and tell all of their friends to visit as well. Unless the country wants lose in the fight to be leetest ones on the planet.

Comrades, to keep your spot as top dogs, you, too, should visit the site as much as you can, and get the rest of your vodka loving friends to do the same. The Americans already have leet technology, and it only becomes more advanced as the days go by.

I’ll post the final statistics at the end of the month to show who came in first.