What I learned during Thanksgiving Break
Most people don’t necessarily think of Thanksgiving as a time of learning, especially when it comes to video games. But I’d like to share some things I’ve learned in the past week. Hopefully, my lessons-learned will inspire and entertain.
Satellite internet providers, such as Wild Blue have great download and upload speeds, but the latency is horrible. Gears of War is unplayable on Xbox Live using such a connection. I’m sure this is common knowledge for all of you. I actually was 100% aware of the difficulties of gaming via satellite, but I guess I’m a glutton for punishment.
Which also explains why I pre-ordered two PS3′s back in September. Thankfully, this required no camping or waiting in line. However, it does require braving the collective internet cesspool of humanity. No, I’m not talking about MySpace. I am, of course, referring to eBay.
When selling something on eBay, there’s a couple things to keep in mind. First, don’t ever ship the product until you have CASH IN HAND. I was not once, but TWICE confronted with ebay swindlers. Naturally, I refused to ship anything until they actually paid me money, but here I am, still trying to sell my PS3′s and make at least SOME profit at this point.
Which leads me to the second lesson of PS3-selling. Make sure that, like the Xbox 360 and Nintendo DS, people actually want to KEEP and PLAY a PS3. Something like 99% of people waiting in line for PS3′s are selling them on eBay (source: conventional wisdom). Problem is no one wants to actually play this crap. That means, the demand for the PS3 consists of people whose only purpose is to re-sell it. Yeah. That’s why PS3′s are selling for only slightly more than retail, as opposed to the much higher prices of Xbox 360′s on eBay even months after its release.
Also, Gears of War is still fun.
Wii Sports surprised me with how fun Boxing was. Unfortunately, aiming appears to be downright pathetic. Although, I haven’t played Zelda or other games where aiming is more integral to the gameplay (like Red Steel), but so far I don’t think I would enjoy them. But games like Boxing or Bowling that require the motion sensing aspect of the remote are pure awesome-sauce. I REALLY want to play ExciteTruck, now.
On the PC side of things, I should mention that Hearts of Iron II has got to be one of the best strategy games of all time. I also gave this to my Dad, a veteran of all 4 Civ games, Harpoon, and many others, and he was definitely intrigued, especially when I showed him the tech screen with its research teams and historically accurate tech trees for each country. T-34′s FTW!
Well, that pretty much sums it up. Now that I’m back from Thanksgiving break, I can get back into serious Gears of War again, and also unfortunately, back to work. Bleh. I hope everyone else had a good Thanksgiving!
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Cpt. Japer
