I thought the racket my 360's DVD drive made during spin up was normal. I mean, everyone bitched and moaned about their 360 unit sounding like a lawnmower. So I figured the sound of my game disc being man handled was, although admittedly unnerving, normal.

Thanks to my friends bringing their healthy 360 units to my birthday party, I got to see just how retarded my unit was compared to the rest of the gene pool. Amongst the harmonic whir of healthy 360's spinning plastic at incredible speeds, my unit crashed into the symphony gnawing and smacking sloppily on my copy of Halo 3. Everyone stared at it like it was a living faux pas. The drunken relative knocking over knick knacks and slurring incomplete jokes. Then everyone looked at me to fix the thing. What can I do with a 360 that hungers for plastic? The same thing most people do with the drunken relative: leave it alone and hope everyone can ignore it.

Everyone at the party may have lived with the embarrassingly annoying ruckus, but they also refused to put their own game discs into it. Who can blame them? 360 games are expensive. Why risk scratching your disc to hell by throwing it into the jaws of a beast? In fact, why the hell was I risking it?

So the following Friday I decided to contact Microsoft's support department about my 360's hungry DVD drive. I receive a reply a few days later. Actually, it's more like the first "shoo-go-away". When it comes to getting hardware repaired, almost every company I've dealt with has given me some sort of initial blow off. The only exception is Nintendo. Nintendo: The Business may be as stubborn as clam shell plastic, but Nintendo: The Customer Service kicks ass.

Microsoft: The Customer Service, in comparison, is also Microsoft: The Sales Department. Here's the entertaining portion of their reply:

"To deliver high definition gaming experiences, the Xbox 360 packs state-of-the-art processing power into a small package. To create an optimal operating environment for hardware with that kind of power, special considerations were taken to control the temperature of the console by optimizing the speed of the cooling fan. Additionally, the Xbox 360 features a high-end disc drive that spins at a very fast rate.

These factors combine to enable faster response times and high fidelity, high definition games with more characters and richer worlds than ever before. We’re confident that as soon as gamers see the spectacular Xbox 360 graphics and hear the amazing surround sound in the games, they'll understand why we've packed so much power into the system."

I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt. They did reply to me quickly. I'm sure a lot of average Joe's may think the normal whirring sound is abnormal, thus hitting up support about "strange noises" from their otherwise perfectly fine unit (wait...is there such a thing as a perfectly fine 360 unit?!?). This portion of the email though...yeah...what the fuck?!?

Last weekend's Larty went well, with the Bay Area's Asian community converging on my house for some video games and cake. The last group of people carried themselves out around 7AM. Just buzzed enough from gaining their second wind to drive home, but not much else.

Props to Pansy for taking pictures. Love to Cathy for putting together this party for me. Thanks to everyone that came out! I appreciate it.

Music then? No. No music. It's cartoon time.

Probably old as hell for some of you, but this is new to me. I saw it on POE and was instantly hooked. It's supposedly produced by MTV Japan. Wait...MTV producing something good?!? That isn't possible in our post 9/11 world.

I'm off to pick up my copy of GTA IV. See you in...like...three months.

I'm trying to pull together a quick little "play video games and hang out" get together at the Ass Crack. AKA my house in Concord. Named Ass Crack more for its placement on the map, not so much because it sucks or anything (it very much does not suck...at all). The plan is to just LAN a bunch of 360's together and maybe Halo 3 it out. Are there better games worth LANing? Probably yes. It's the only game that comes to mind that is quick and easy to get going with multiple machines (without dragging out entire PC set ups). I wonder if GTA IV can be LAN'd...hmmmm!

If you know me and you wanna come out, let me know. It starts this Saturday afternoon and goes until whenever Sunday. We're technically celebrating my birthday, so there will be hamburgers and ice cream cake. I'm not allowed to drink alcohol until I am off my medication, so you're gonna have to bring your own liquor (and don't be offended if I don't drink with you...maybe next year).

On the game front, Cathy picked me up a PSP. This wasn't a mistake, but a gift I actually requested (she's the shit)! I know, crazy. I felt like this was the right time to finally poke around this machine's library. Especially since the games seem to be getting really cheap and there appears to be a handful of unappreciated gems lodged just beneath the surface.

If someone can recommend a good, large and cheap memory card to use with the PSP, please shoot me a recommendation. The first game I got is Jean D'Arc and I really want to push further into this game...without spending more than 20 bucks for a memory stick.

Music then?

Yeah. I fucking did it. Lisa Lisa. I can't listen to the female vocals on most techno/electronica tracks without thinking about these songs. I like to think Lisa Lisa is owed at least a little chunk of credit for inspiring that sound.

Can you name every arcade machine in this video?

You'd think that I'd have something interesting to say in this post, but I don't. Tomorrow I am 30. Well. Wait. I'll say what I told everyone else when they were turning 30:

The twenties are overrated.

Actually, I'm reminded of this picture I used on my old blog:

Let me just change that up...

There!

Poppycock!

Props to some random guy in #capcom.

...is the best Street Fighter title ever. I thought I'd just stop by and say that. I've been playing against people in this game for a straight month now and every night I'm reminded of why this game is the shit.

I wish I could find a poster of the image above. The concept art for this game is kind of Hogarth-ish. Especially in the hands. It's worth checking out.

One more week until my 20's end. What a fucking horrible waste of a decade this has been. People say 30 is the new 21, which from my perspective says a lot about my generation's inability to kick-start their lives and break through their personal inhibitions.

Don't let your kids grow up to be bearded artists. They'll starve.

Fuck those kids.

I told myself that I wasn't going to say anything about this, because it is pretty stupid and unimportant in the grand scheme of the world around me...but I still can't resist. This entire issue is so fucking fail. Will slabonomics eventually effect my Sunday game hunts? That's what us game collecting nerds are spitting Cheetos into our beards about this week.

EGM without Shoe btw. That is fucking weird.

Also, there is a big GGPO Alpha 2 donation tournament tomorrow. Yours truly is running it. Attendance is low, partially because people think the Internet = everything should be free. I am sure Ponder is flipping a major bill for the server we all play on, so I don't think it is too much to ask for people to step up and donate a little bit every other month. Especially when there is a chance to win prizes and have fun doing it. So if you use GGPO and you're free tomorrow, sign up. If not, at least toss a buck at the guy.

Edit: This commercial is dope. Supposedly done by Production I.G. Found via POETV. Remember when Japanese animation was cool like this?

I installed Maya 8.5 tonight expecting to work on some new models. I was hoping that Autodesk would improve their video card support from 7.0. What the hell was I thinking?

A couple of months ago I was telling a friend I went to school with about my opinion of the Computer Art medium.

“It doesn't feel like we are making something look a certain way for the sake of anything other than...well...let's make it look like something.”

“What?!?”

“When I sit down and draw in my sketchbook, I see improvement. I see a physical and mental improvement in how I create something using my bare hands. It's an improvement that can withstand the test of time. You'd never know if I drew these things 10 years ago or just now. When I sit down at the computer and model something, I don't see improvement. I see an understanding of how to hack and trick the program into making something look like something. Our medium is nothing but tricks and hackery. We're looking for the ultimate 'make-look-good' button to slap on our boring ass space marines. What about the space marines that looked good last year? They don't mean anything to anyone anymore.”

"Pffffft! Whatever man."

I can, or actually I should say have to, go back to Maya 6.5 in order to see my normal maps with my rinky dink video card. To put that into perspective, that is almost 3 year old software! I check Autodesk's hardware compatibility list and their latest build of Maya will only fully support 500-2,000 dollar fucking video cards!?! It seriously gets me heated when I think about having to step back to 6.5 in order to properly work on and see normal maps.

I loosely heard or read a quote from Hideo Kojima during his time working on Metal Gear Solid 2 that has stuck with me during these situations. I say loosely because I can't find the article and I fear that I am just making the entire episode up in my head. He was lamenting about the shitty cannibalistic nature of the video game medium. I believe the quote went something like, “If aliens came down to earth and find humanity wiped out, books and paintings will be the only useful artifacts we will leave them. How are they going to play one of my video games? What if they run into a copy of Sons of Liberty? They'll have to figure out that the disc they hold in their alien hands plays on a specific region PS2, so they have to figure out what that is and find a working unit. Then they'll have to find an ancient compatible television set to play it on. Then they'll have to have a memory card unit. Then a controller. Then video cables and a power adapter. All these hoops just to experience this one game. This medium is horrible.”

Again...loose quote. He may have not even said it.

There's nothing I can do about my Maya situation but rant and throw things. When I am done typing this up I am going to throw an empty water bottle across the room. Then go back to Maya 6.5 and model up some stuff.

I'm in a strange mood. So...here's a strange post.

I've decided to dive head first into Flash. I gathered up a copy of Flash CS3 with a pile of Actionscript 3 tutorials and I am trying to cram the information into my brain as quickly as possible. I'm hoping to create a button by Thursday.

The more I tinker and read, the more it looks like Actionscript use to be a little friendlier to those whose coding experience leaned more towards HTML with a little bit of Java script tossed in. Then Actionscript 3 kicks in and everything looks like it is heavily influenced by C/C++. This has to be a pain in the ass for artists that don't want to, or resent having to, code anything to create. I understand some of the changes are for the better from a coding standpoint, but from an ease of use perspective...I dunno. I mean, I still don't know which is the better way to create a button. Code it or use the Flash CS3 visual tools? It looks like with the older versions, you created a button and then wrote a quick script for it. Here, it looks like you have to consider the code for the entire project before even thinking of adding a button to the mix. Which seems kind of daunting.

These are the ramblings of a Flash noob though. So I'm sure my perspective on this is wrong right now.

On the game front, I'm 5 hours into Persona 3. Yeah, I probably should have held off for the FES version releasing this month. Fuck it though. I should have started this game at least 6 months ago. I'm hoping that my save file from this version of Persona 3 will work with FES. If not, I'm going to be an annoyed consumer.

As for Persona 3 the game, not Persona 3 the multiple SKU release schedule: I'm happy with it. I only have two complaints so far. First, it takes two hours for your in-game character to get settled into the story to the point where the player can start making decisions (I clocked in almost an hour before my first peek at the battle system). Second, you have no control over the day/night schedule. I expected to get a lot more freedom while being under a “real time” in-game clock, having to do school shit during the game's day time and spirit ass kicking at night. Days are way more structured than I expected, with interaction only happening when the game wants you to make a choice. It doesn't make the experience bad, but it also isn't what I was expecting.

Otherwise it's all the quirkiness of a Persona title with the culture shock of handling the day in-day-out social routine of a Japanese high school student. *POSSIBLE SPOILERS* I joined the Kendo team and student council. One of my best friends keeps bugging me about some chick I share the dorm with like he is 12 years old (while hatching a plan to date a teacher). The main character has “too cool to see” hair and stands like his dick is stuck in an imaginary glory hole. It's all very charming.


I said hey...hey...hey!