I have it but haven't played more than the first few minutes so can't speak to length.

But did want to mention you can get both Shadowgrounds games for $12.95 on Steam (which is where I got them). I think that price goes away sometime today.

I played D&D Online for the first time last month and ending up canceling after the free month was done.

I did like the novel concept of the game where you level up by, not by killing monsters, but by completing dungeon quests. Battles were more action oriented than standard MMOs. Instead of just going up to a monster hitting "Q" on the keyboard to initiate an attack then clicking a few icons you actually had to click the mouse button each time you wanted to swing your weapon. Or hold down the mouse button to block and attack. Positioning mattered too where more damage would be done if you attack a monster from the side or back. And to spice things up you also had spells and abilities to use during battles. And if that wasn't enough you could hold down the shift button to dodge or roll out of the way of monsters.
 
So while the concept was neat in practice it didn't work so well. Battles ended up being click fests so you could swing your weapon as fast as possible. At some point though your character animation would fall behind your frenzied clicking so when you tried to initiate a timely spell, ability, or heal you would have to wait for the swinging to catch up. So many battles I would end up using abilities when the fight was almost over or my partner was crumpling to the ground because I didn't heal in time "sorry! still swinging!"

I never did figure out how rolling or dodging benefited me. No matter how acrobatic and crazy I was in my maneuvering, monsters always faced me. Even zombies possessed some type of heat seeking radar to keep me faced in front of them.

I'm sure there was some type of finesse to the combat I was missing but I couldn't figure it out. So I basically turned in to a Street Fighter II button masher.

Now if the game had any room for finesse, at least in the early levels, Turbine wasn't making it easy to discover. Get this, almost all abilities/buffs last 15 seconds. Yes, the actual ability/buff description says it lasts 15 seconds. How is a 10% dodge increase for 15 seconds going to help in the course of a battle exactly? In the time it takes to hunt down the ability icon you could get in 8 or 9 more mouse clicks! Instead of spending time

It basically meant all those pretty icons were useless with the exception of DD spells, heals and out of combat abilities.

Couple this with the fact that you could only use those buffs/abilities a set number of times per "day" made them particularly tempting to just ignore all together.

The other thing that drove me nuts was that equipment, particularly weapons, took damage so easily and when you repaired them you didn't get the full "health" of the item back. Slimes are a menace to equipment and should be banned from all lower level dungeons. They particularly love to eat through maces to the point where I was bringing 3 of those weapons with me so I could last the entire dungeon crawl.

Despite all that I did have fun with the game for that month. Some of those dungeon quests were neat and well written. But I couldn't see forking over $14 a month for a game I would mainly button smash with.

Just a week ago I started playing Lord of the Rings Online and am enjoying that one quite a bit. With the holiday pricing of $10 a month I'll probably keep that one going for awhile along with my regular standby EQ2.

I still laugh till I cry at THIS DNF ventrillo server verbal assault hehehe. Its  NSFW due to language. Some guy in Vent starts using Duke voice clips to harrass some bi%$#. Really pisses her off till near the end she's freaking out. Goes on like 40 minutes heheh.

They need to add mini game based on this and include it in the actual game. That was hilarious.

I saw the film the other day and didn't think they did the books much justice. The pacing was way too fast in some areas and they seemed to leave out a lot of the dialogue that built the characters in favor of action/special effects. I didn't quite see where the $200m went in to the film. There were a lot of special effects but I've seen other movies with about the same amount that cost far less.

I do have to say they did a good job with the polar bear fight. Usually CG creature battles are pretty lame but they got enough through that you actually cared about the outcome.

I'm mixed on if I want them to continue making the movies. The second book was my favorite and I could hardly put it down. But after the lackluster first movie I'd hate to see them water that one down too in favor of action/special effects.

I would definitely check out other electronic stores to see TVs in action. I found Circuit City and Best Buy had the worst set up for video source and no callibration for their TVs. I went to Tweeter and Abt Electronics and they had most of their TVs running off of DVD players (upconvered or blu-ray) or from an obvious HD source giving me a much better idea of what I was in store for. Tweeter in particular was running some Discovery HD promo videos which had my jaw dropping - I was happy to find out that the actual broadcasts from Discovery HD were just as amazing when I got a TV home.

You may want to bring your own DVDs too and have them play on the sets (Tweeter was totally cool with me doing that). You're familiar with how they look on your own set so will be able to see the difference. If you want to test how the black levels look on the set you can bring a DVD that has a lot of black in it such as Alien or Sin City.

I bought a plasma and have had no issues with anything mentioned here (glare, heat, burn-in) but with these latest gen of technology you probably won't notice a huge difference between the comparable name brands.

I'm wondering what the Tivo to go thing is and how it works?  I understand that in some way it lets you make copies of the stuff you've recorded right?  Does it let you remove the commercials?

TiVoToGo allows you to transfer shows from your TiVo to and from your computer/portable media device. So you can transfer shows to your computer/portable device, watch them there, or burn them to DVD (need to purchase specific software to this). Being able to transfer shows from the PC to the TiVo is a nice feature as it allows you to use your computer hard drive to store TiVo recorded shows. You can also transfer any MPEG-2 video files to your TiVo to watch.

Transferring doesn't remove commercials. You can do that with the DVD burning software but from what I've read its a time consuming process to both remove and re-encode the video once the commercials are cut. It sounds like it's not worth it unless you are dead set against seeing any type of advertisement.

Yeah, it seemed like Best Buy was the store best prepared for the crowds. The first Circuit City I went to was a total mess. I made my way to the registers where there were a few lines. I was stopped before I could get there and told the line started in middle isle of the store. So I went to the middle isle and decided to walk out of the store. There were what looked to be three huge lines snaked off of the main isle with no one directing. One went down one of the DVD isles where no one could get by. Another was snaked around the back of the store ending up god knows where. The other one was straight down the middle of the isle. No orginization at all.

So I put back what I had (2 games) and went to another Circuit City near a Target I wanted to hit and there was no wait at that one.

Made out with the following loot:

Circuit City:
Super Mario Galaxy Wii $34.99
Halo 3 XB360 $59.99 (w/ $10 giftcard, which they just took off the game)

Target:

Gears of War XB360 - $38
Call of Duty 4 - $48

Best Buy:

LOTR Online x2 - $9.99
Panasonic 5.8GHz Digital Cordless Phone Set w/ 2 Handsets - $59.99

Gamecrazy:

Dead Rising - $19.99

Overlord is a must if you haven't played that yet. Hopefully they worked some of the kinks out of it. There was a period there where I had to uninstall and reinstall the game to get past certain parts of the game.

I would put Uplink: Hacker Elite and Space Colony on your list of games to check out too. Those two were surprises for me on how fun they were.

But yeah, the amount of choices are overwhelming.

We're at the Lava area now and really enjoying the game so far. With the two of us we've been able to figure out all the puzzles without assistance. The puzzles tend to be logical and I love that you can usually reason solutions out once you have all the pieces or a little trail and error.

So far the only puzzle that really had us stuck was the last ice level. You die a lot in that one and each time you die the solution changes, which is REALLY annoying. We finally had use pen and paper to help us finish the level; when we did finally finish it we had the highest score so that was a small comfort.

The game did start to get nasty on the lava levels as you can find yourself near the end of a puzzle and make one fatal mistake that means you either have to start over or use up a life.

In any case I noticed the same thing with the treasure you get from the rabbit who goes out on the map. I can't find where it is documented either. So far I've only been able to complete one of those songs - and that took forever. The other two I've come across have been impossible. The song guy needs to be a lot more forgiving.

I remember when Pac-Man came out for the 2600.  My friends and I went apeshit - "You mean we can play Pac-Man and won't have to pay a quarter??!!"

Which quickly became "What is this shit?"

I think my father ended up paying something in the neighborhood of $80 for Pac Man around X-Mas time from Sears. We were very disappointed in the game but I played it any ways. It does have it's memories though. I can still clearly remember the 'bonking' sound of eating pellets.

In any case my general memories:

- Playing a single game of Missile Command for about 6-7 hours in to the wee hours of the morning and flipping the score
- Turning over the Chuck Norris Superkicks cartridge over to play some Artillery Duel
- Excitedly purchasing 99 cent games near the time of the video game crash and then realizing they were crap
- Blowing in to the cartridges to get the dust out
- Discovering you could 'cheat' in Decathlon using the Powerstick joystick by placing it upside down on the ground and wiggling; consequently I broke several of these mini-joysticks playing in this manner but had some amazing scores, particularly in the pole vault - joystick picture url http://www.amigau.com/aig/joysticks.jpg
- The blaring noise the 2600 made if you didn't push the cartridge in far enough
- Flipping through the 2600 game catalogs
- Knowing I should have asked for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back instead of James Bond

Was a great console for a time when I spent too much of my time playing video games both at home and in the arcades.

I picked it up for $10 as well. Then got it home and realized it was the add-on. Bah.

Also Jade Empire was $15 which I picked up as well.

Origin's Knights of Legend by any chance? Think one of the races had a wings.

The games most distinguishing feature on the C64 was having to swap disks continually. I really wanted to play the game but the amount of disk swapping that needed to be done was just inane.

So a fewweeks ago I broke down and purchased an Xbox 360 as I REALLY wanted to play Bioshock. I created an account for the Box "Crawley" and started playing Bioshock. It wasn't until several days later that I hooked the 360 up to my router. When I went on to Live it said my name was already in use (no surprise there) so I just created a new name.

I went on using the 360 and playing Bioshock when I noticed that I had two log in names. One, "Crawley" had all my Bioshock achievements, and my Live account name didn't have any. When I would log in with my Live account name and play Bioshock none of the saves were there either.

Is there a way to merge these two accounts in to one? I suppose it's not a huge deal as I'll just delete the "Crawley" account once I finish Bioshock but it would be nice to send over any achievements I did accomplish for the game to this other account.

I played through the tutorials yesterday (there's like 11). They certainly put a lot of thought in to the game as there's quite a lot to it.

Other than playing Magic a bit I haven't tried any of the other collectable card games but it seems similar in some ways to Magic. LON has got 2 players, you play monster/spell/ability cards that have certain stats, you have a mana/health pool, etc. Where it might get a bit different is the way to win. You either win by reducing the other players health to 0 or by completing quest cards.

The quest cards basically boil down to sacrificing other cards (ability cards) to complete them. After completing 4 quests you win.

It can get nasty as your opponent can be working on the same quest as you (there are 2 in play at any given time) and if you complete the quest before them they lose any points they have put in to it.

There's a few other nuances to it beyond just the cards but it looks like it could be fun.

I haven't tried playing a live game against anyone yet (took me like an hour and a half to get through those tutorials) so can't comment on how that works. But looking forward to it and getting some in-game items from playing.

My wife and I are totally addicted to this game and absolutely love it. It's kinda surprising for her to like this game as she pretty much only plays adventure games. This game is basically a retooled version of Pikmin. I would not have regretted playing full price so paying the Gametap price makes it a steal.

Plus there's more goodies in the "coming soon" section of Gametap including Grim and Jericho.

With cable cards, do you have to rent, or do you buy them, and how much do they generally go for?  Is it cheaper than having the full cable box?  VOD isn't really something we use at all, so that's no loss.

You rent the cable cards from the cable company who will need to come out and install and set them up. There's nothing to it for the install but they need to sync some information up from the cards, your TiVo unit, and the cable mothership before it will start working.

The price is all over the place. They're supposed to be an inexpensive alternative to the cable box but it was left open to the cable operators what to charge. So you'll find prices ranging from free to about $5 a month. You need to call your cable operator to find out what they are charging per card.

So, this cable card thing.  What's the deal?  Does it eliminate the need to have a cable box?  Does it cost anything to get the cable cards?  And have they talked price for the external storage thing?

Yes, the cable cards replace the cable box. The TiVo HD also supports the M-Card (multistreaming) which means you only need a single M-Card for both tuners. So it should be cheaper to use a single cable card than two. Problem is the M-Cards are new and pretty rare so most markets won't have them right off the bat. But good for future knowledge as you'll be able to cut down on an extra $3-$4 a month on the second cable card.

The problem with the current crop of cable cards is none of them support VOD. It's a big deal to some people. So until a cable card that supports 2-way communication comes on the market you're out of luck with that short of getting a separate cable box.

As far as external storage there is a SATA port on the back of the unit where you can hook up an external SATA hard drive for additional capacity. The official word is that this support is coming late 2007. Series 3 owners are currently enjoying this feature by using a back door code. It's not officially supported but TiVo seems to be looking the other way right now with people who have used it. It's still unknown if the TiVo HD will have this back door code with it, so best to set expectations that you'll be waiting to the official feature roll out.

But the TiVos have always been "easily" upgradable by replacing the internal hard drive with a larger one. If you don't want to do it your self there are companies like Weaknees and DVRUpgrade that either do it for you or send you the kits to do it. Both of those sites are already accepting pre-orders for upgraded TiVo HDs - the most expensive, offering 125 hours of HD recording, costs about as much as a Series 3.

So what does the in-game advertising in BF2142 actually look like? It's been awhile since I uninstalled it but when I was playing it heavily I never noticed the ads appearing.

I didn't notice any major downloading slowdown (paid version) but I would imagine with yesterdays launch there were a lot of people trying it out all at once. The only thing driving traffic spikes going forward will be quality of the free game selections each Thursday.

I'd highly reccomend giving Dorm a try. The trailer bills it as another j-horror flick but it's actually a real nice coming of age story, almost like a Stand By Me. I sat down to watch it a few nights ago. My wife, who was on her way up to do something on the computer, decided to check out the beginning. We ended up watching the whole thing together and both enjoyed it immensely.

There's a lot of nice little mystery plot elements at the start, all of which all get answered throughout the film. It's got a few scares, a couple big laughs, and some touching moments to make a well rounded film.

This is Thai film so there is a bit of cultural elements that I can see being very odd to a Western audience when they pop up (apparently the Thai like there pissing scenes) but it's well grounded enough on the basic elements, that it makes the film easy for universal consumption.

So give it either a Netflix/Blockbuster rental.

Its difficult to say how much of an impact on the game most of that will have until you actually start playing it. It may not even turn out to be that big deal to have more locker or character slots. I can't see many people buying in to this right away until they see how this impacts them.

They probably should have done the pricing structure where you can just do single purchases for all this "extra stuff."

- $1 for extra character slot
- $1 for bonus armor set
- $0.10 to travel to area x

So if it tanks initially I would start expecting a cheaper "new subscriber" offer to show up within a few months. Or if really poor sales they just give this stuff away for free on the games anniversary.

Can get a S3 for $500 from TiVo and it comes with their wireless adapter: http://www.tivo.com/0.11.welcomeback.asp

Home Video Movie Sharing (Yes) - http://www.tivo.com/4.9.26.asp
TiVoToGo Show Transfers (No)
Multi-Room Viewing Transfers (No)

It's supposed to be Saturn emulation from what I read. It wasn't a console I owned (nor many people I guess) so looking forward to trying out the Saturn library. Really impressed with the service, the games they get on there, and the frequency they appear. Got in on that great September deal with a lot of skepticism about the service (saw a few games I wanted to play that I never had but not much else) but if I had to right now I would renew the subscription - but thankfully I'm good till October.

I thought you were able to play actual notes in LOTRO composing your own music. Is that the case or is it just selecting various combinations of predefined sequences of notes?

I saw a story on Joystiq the other day showing how musical instruments are actually playable (through the keyboard). Has anyone tried this out and have some feedback on it? This actually sounds like a pretty unique intergration that has me rather interested.

Here's the Joystiq blurb on it - http://www.joystiq.com/2007/03/18/lord-of-the-rings-online-music-system/

Very nice. After McAfee kept getting overloaded with junk and an overally complicated menu system I asked for opinions of virus checkers here. This was one of the ones that was suggested. After doing the trial I haven't used anything but as it did everything I wanted.

Highly reccomend it. Very small footprint on your computer, easy to navigate, automatically scans new files before you open them and very fast.

My wife for some odd reason chose to stay with McAfee, even though she complains about it, but hopefully the price point will get her to finally ditch it.

There was 60's monster movie called Navy vs The Night Monsters where they ended up napalming a valley full of plant creatures. So it meets the criteria but I'm not sure how you could mistake one movie for the other. Basically Navy vs The Night Monsters is a film to be played on the MST3K ripoff shows.

Picked it up yesterday. I was really anticipating this one as it would be another Wii Sports type dealie but it was pretty disappointing. The Table Tennis in particular since, as described above, it is nothing more than Pong. Was hoping for a more frantic version of Wii Tennis.

Fishing was also a disappointment. It's a single small watering hole where you can already see the fish. You basically just need to position your line over the pool, wait for a nibble, and pull back on the remote. You don't even get to cast the line.

Billiards seems the most full fledge one but looks like you can only play 9-ball. I didn't get to try the 2 player mode out as my wife was having a hell of a performing the motions to hit the ball. I have no idea what was wrong since I asked her to let me try and I was able to do it just fine. It was funny to see her make a stabbing mation over and over again without any affect - my added "Kiyaah!" and "Banzai!" shouts kept me entertained but seemed to frustrate her more.

She was a master at Find Mii, which I sucked at. She was at level 35 or something insane like that before she finally got stumped. That one only has limited replayability. Same goes for Pose Mii which was fun but I can't see playing it often.

Probably the most fun game we played together was Charge!. But it again felt more like a test demo as there was just a single track and nothing new once you went through the race once.

All in all pretty disappointing so I was thankful I had a $5 off coupon and used some Rewards gift cards to pay for it. There's potentail to make some nice full fledged games out of some of these mini-games so hopefully they'll do that as this was pretty lacking.

You can't split a satellite signal so you won't get dual tuner use. The Series 2 DT also has a digital tuner and an analog tuner. The satellite signal is digital so can only use that. So if you just hook the satellite up it will perform like a single tuner model. To get the dual tuner functionality you would need to get a analog cable line (basic cable) and plug that in as well.

The Series 2 DT has some limitations on what it can record at once as is since it has one analog and one digital tuner. That means you can record 2 analog stations (usually 1-99) together and one analog and one digital station but you cannot record two digital stations at the same time.

So you're probably better off getting a regular single tuner Series 2. Of if you have two satellite receivers in the house you can purchase two single tuner Series 2's and hook them up to each and do what you're saying. I.e one would hook up in the living room and the other would hook up to the bedroom.

TiVo has pretty much been moving away from supporting satellite. The Series 3 won't support it at all. Just cable cards. But it still works fine with the single tuner Series 2 with the single tuner limitations.

Yeah, that was a nice little bonus. I played the first few missions and they work fine. Good memories.

They also have X-Com in the "coming soon" section online. I hope that means they'll get the sequels. I never did play Terror From the Deep.

Looking forward to the end of Feburary for Interstate '76 and Interstate '82. Never did purchase I82 so will be neat to play.

The lag in big releases hasn't bothered me yet. There's just too much to play on there as is. Still have yet to crack any of the Genesis RPGs I want to play and finish and still haven't got around to playing the second epsiode of Sam & Max.

I think its all the DS Lites, not just the Pink ones. I've been trying to get one for my sister for X-Mas for about a week now and none of the stores around here (BB, Target, CC, Walmart, even tried Sears) have'em. Checking online met with the same results. A few on Amazon are selling for about $30 over the regular price.

Never would have thought I would have had problems finding one. Ah well. Backup gift time.

I can see Nintendo releasing a "Sports Extreme!" version of the Wiimote for those people who like to "play their console hard!" Instant hit for those consumers who imagine themsleves as atheletes playing that way.

I would buy one.  :icon_sad:

I decided to use my latest unlock for the engineer Anti-Aircraft weapon after someone else had posted they had some success with using this weapon in Titan battles once the shields were down. So it being my last engineer unlock I decided what they hey. I have to say this weapon is a lot of fun once the shields go down.

Once our shields went I launched myself on top of our Titan during the next spawn. I targeted the area the enemy Titan was located and would frequently get frequent lock-ons as the enemy tried to head over to our Titan. The smaller ships I was able to take out pretty easily with two shots (the weapon holds two shots). The transport ships seemed to take 3 but I killed a few with just 2. Some nice points plus some kills received the Titan defence bonus - some didn't though so wasn't sure what was up.

As a bonus those enemies that did get over to the ship and land on the top of the Titan were not expecting me and were pretty easy kills with the machine gun.

Whenever I ran out of ammo I would pop down the vent shaft, find the nearest support guy or dropped ammo crate, refresh and head back up. One game there was a support crate on the top of the Titan which made this process even quicker.

One issue came in to play when the two Titans were right next to each other. The AA weapon had a bit of a trouble locking on or the shots would go haywire. So it wasn't as effective in that circumstance but it must have been annoying for the other team to get in to their ships and already have a lock on while they were still parked.

This isn't going to be my normal method of getting points (that's left to silo captures and mine placement) but its a lot of fun being able to make it rather annoying to try and get over to our Titan.

Well I went to the Best Buy I thought would be no problem getting one. I knew they were handing out tickets at 8am but figured there would be plenty and not a lot of people so didn't bother getting there till around 7:30am. Was I wrong about there not going to be a lot of people. There were about 50 in line. I decided to give it a shot and parked, put on my sweatshirt, gloves, grabbed my book and got in line. About a minute or so after I got in line someone came behind me and then a few minutes later someone behind him.

It was cold but not too bad with the warm clothes.

Back where I was I couldn't see the entrance so had no idea what was going on up there. Around 7:50 one of the Best Buy employees walks down the line and is in the middle of a count "43...44...45...". He get somewhat close to where I am and then asks everyone who is actually purchasing one today to raise their hands. A lot of hands go up but a few (kids with families) don't. He starts counting again "56...57...58....oh my god I think we have enough!...59...", he's really excited at this point, two more guys jumped in the back of the line in seconds of each other "60...61" (that's me) "...62...63!" He told us they had a total of 63 units. The two guys that just joined were out of luck but they decided to stick around in case the guy miscounted units, or counted too quickly.

I was a bit nervous since it could go either way.

During this time there were two police officers around and making sure there was order. I was happy about that but other than two cars that peeled out of the parking lot after seeing the line it was a pretty laid back group.

About 15 minutes later I see a few people run to their cars. Some had sleeping bags and camping equipment so I gathered they were passing out tickets and allowing people to go back to their cars until the store opened (at 9am). That was great since it was getting colder and by then the cold was getting to me. The ticket guy got in to view about 10 minute later and I got my ticket...#62. The guy who came right after me got the final ticket #63. I was VERY luck as a few missed lights and I would have been out of luck. The girl behind #63 took it well and decided to join a group she seemed to know further up. Numbers 65 and 66 decided to stick around as well...just in case.

Sat in the car till about 10 minutes to 9am. Everyone had lined up again and Best Buy wanted everyone in the order of their ticket number. Was all very organized and the BB employee's had walked down the line making sure everyone got the message. They also talked about the availability of games including that they only had like 50 Zelda's on hand. That had me worried as that the main game I wanted to get. The BB employee asked whomever was not getting Zelda to raise their hands and quite a few people did which renewed my hope.

For some odd reason #60 and #61 were not in the line. This brought renewed hope to #65 and #66, since if these guys didn't claim their spots the next ones in lines would have gotten it.

The line started moving a bit later. They split the group in half where the back half waited outside for another 10 minutes or so. By this time it was really cold and the wind was kicking up. One kid had what looked like T-Shirt and a Fall jacket on. No idea how he managed as I was cold with everything I had on.

Finally got in to the store and they lined up the second half in the customer service area why the first half got in the purchasing line. They had set up two tables which the purchasers go through one at a time. First table the games. Grab what you want and move on to the second table which had the accessories. Grab what you want and then move to one of the 3 cash registers where they give you your Wii and you pay for everything.

At this point I couldn't see any of that as we were on one side of the BB and the purchasing group on the other. At one point we heard a group of people sing "happy birthday" so I imagine it was the first purchaser.

To the disapointment to #65 and #66 the two missing guys showed up about 15 minutes after we go in the store. Apparently they left after they got their ticket and got lost coming back. #65 and #66 wandered off for a bit then came back with renewed hope thinking someones credit card won't go through or some other mishap.

It took about 25-30 minutes to finally get our group moved to the main line where the two desks were. It was slow going and was getting worried about the Zelda's left. The guy behind me was also very worried as that's the only game he wanted. So at one point, there were about 15 people ahead of me still waiting to get to the first desk with the games, one of the two guys who had been waiting around came to the back of the line with a Wii ticket. Turns out #42 defaulted or gave up their ticket - it wasn't clear what. The girl wasn't around so #65 got it. He was ecstatic of course. #66 was totally bumbed but put on a good face.

When I got up to the game desk I was happy to see there were plenty of Zelda's left. I'd say about 11 or 12. They also had plenty of everything else it looks like so they were well stocked with games (Monkey Ball was all gone). I picked up Rayman and Trauma Center and was content. I also picked up the last Wii Remote which the guy behind me really wanted. But so did my wife. Sorry! 

When I finally went to pay for it they had only run up the games and forgot to ring up the Wii. The casher was handing it to me. With my gift cards the total would have been $199. But that few seconds of hope for a free Wii was dashed when one of the BB employees overseeing the purchases noticed the mistake and ended up paying for the Wii anyways. Ah well.

I have to say this BB had its act together. Everything was organized and the BB employees were great with giving out information. I like that the police were there and remained there until everyone walked out with their purchase.

So overall it was a pretty good experience. I can never see camping out for anything but waiting in the cold for an hour and a half is doable.

I ended up hitting several stores after this looking for an extra Numchuck. Targets, Gamestops, Circuit City were all Wii graveyards. Surprisingly the two Walmarts I went to had stuff. One had the a few of the classic controllers and Wii Remotes but no Numchuck. The other had a few Wii Remotes. So looks like they got more of the accessories. If you're trying to hunt down extra controllers those that may be the place to go.

For those that didn't get one it sounded like the BB employees were indicating they were expecting more to come in as the days go on but were not sure when they would ever see another PS3.

Did your friend read the book first?

No he did not but is interested in reading it after seeing the film.

I finally finished the last Dark Tower book (it was a chore to read through  :icon_sad:) so started in on Perfume this morning on the train ride in. Only through the first chapter but it reads well so far.

I picked up the book a few weeks ago but haven't had a chance to read it yet. It's actually a short book (like 200 pages). The trailer did look good though.

A friend who got a screener copy of the film watched it and had seemed to enjoy it overall. He said it was good until it got to the middle, where he said he didn't like the direction the movie took, then it picked up in the last 20 minutes which he said was fantastic. There's supposedly a lot of sex in this film.
He also mentioned the movie should look fantastic on the big screen and the sound track was great.

So I'm looking forward to it. The movie does look good.

Kinda looks like a one trick pony with the swinging hammer. If it has online multiplayer that might be fun.

It looks like the Contra Games and the Castlevania games all come in the same pack which may account for the longer download. I had Castlevania 3 download (it took about 6 minutes for me) and the main menu had a selection for the other Konami games. I was disappointed these were the Windows versions of the games as they didn't look so hot in the graphics department but played fine.

Really glad they got Serious Sam 2 though. After I saw they had the 1st one and the add-on I was hoping for the actual sequel to show up soon....and sure enough. But looks like a lot of people were downloading it as I was getting something insane like a 600 minute download time.

Really liking this service though.

I watched the Gary Gygax mini-documentary while Castlevania was downloading and actually sat through the whole thing. They do a pretty good job with the production values of their videos.

The only minor sore spot I've had with the service is a few crashes upon launching games. But it's been painless to just ctrl+alt+delete the launching game and re-launch it. So it's a minor quibble. My very positive initial impressions of the service have held up since I bought in to it.