You remember Goozex right? If not, read up on them on one of my previous posts at this link. Well, great news, I’ve been brought on as an associate writer for their member-run blog The Goozex Report. I’m very excited to be an even bigger part of their community, and wanted to share my first article with you. Give it a spin here, and let me know what you think.

Thanks everyone!

Care to see your favorite gaming consoles and peripherals with x-ray vision? Your wish has come true. Check the following link for one person’s flickr gallery. Very cool.

X-Ray Funnies – a set on Flickr.

G4 has again been named the official broadcaster of E3 2009, and with only a month to go until keynotes, I’m definitely excited. Let’s just hope I don’t relive the fiasco that was E3 2007 on the same network. See my rant for more information on that.

G4 promises to provide over 22 hours of content, including five keynotes, hands on demos, interviews, and Steve Wiebe with another one of his live Donkey Kong high score attempts. If you’re unfamiliar with Steve, then be sure to check out the documentary: The King of Kong. It’s a great film. Other than that, additional details on the broadcast can be found at the following link.

G4 Named Official Broadcaster Of E3 2009 – G4tv.com.

And for those of you who wanted to check out the review from IGN, here you are. Sadly, they reviewed the game higher than the actual film.

IGN: X-Men Origins: Wolverine — Uncaged Edition Review.

I heard the rumors. I thought previews of the game had adequately described the game. They did not. I was wrong.

Those expecting a simple translation of the upcoming film are in for quite a surprise. A sweet one for some (me), and a sickening one for others. This game shows Wolverine portrayed, as well, more unleashed than in the film. This game is violent. Heads are cut off (by claws), heads are impaled (by claws), heads are pushed through chopper blades (with claws), and I’d imagine if the demo were a bit longer, we’d see them burnt and crushed. It just seems to be the natural progression for the content of this title. To see this happen with a licensed game is  stunning. I personally think it’s the right choice, I mean, Wolverine is supposed to be vicious.

As far as gameplay is concered, it’s pretty much standard fare for a 3rd person action game. Think Ninja Gaiden, with Wolverine instead of Ryu. I can’t say that I’ll be picking up the title based solely off its merits of violence, so we’ll have to see where reviews go, but definitely pick up the demo. You’ll be entertained in one way or another, and the only cost is bandwidth.

I spend a lot of money on games. I mean a lot. I buy 2 -3 new games a month easy. It’s an expensive habit, and it adds up, but hell, if you can’t enojoy yourself, then what good is living? I listen to a handful of gaming postcasts, and one day the topic was Goozex. I was intruiged, and looked into it further. I’m glad I did, because this site is awesome; something that anyone on a budget needs to take a good hard look at.

The idea is simple. Tired of getting ripped off at Game Crazy or Gamestop? Those unfamiliar, these companies thrive on giving you the smallest amount of money (or in store credit to be more accurate) for your game as possible. They then turn around and sell your game for the most they expect another will pay. The outcome? Sick sick profit. Goozex takes another approach. They use, what I refer to as, a lateral credit system. This means that when you trade a game, you get what Goozex deems to be the appropriate market value. No less. They have an algorithm working which takes the average value of a title, and adjusts slightly based off of demand. Using this information they then give each game a point value ranging anywhere from 100 – 1000 points.

Once you have some games you’d like to trade, you simply visit http://www.goozex.com, look up the game you’d like to dump, then place this in your offers queue. Goozex then adds your game to a list of available games. Once Goozex finds someone who wishes to purchase your games with their points, you accept their offer for your game, mail it off to them, and once they give you positive feedback, you’re credited points to your account. It sounds a bit complicated, so let me provide a quick example.

I had a copy of Silent Hill: Homecoming for my Playstation 3 which I no longer wanted (I purchased an Xbox 360 version for achievements… I feel so dirty). Goozex decided that it was worth 800 pionts (equal to $40.00), so I placed it into my offeres queue. After a few minutes, Goozex found a match, meaning someone had placed the title into their requests queue. I accepted the trade, shipped the title off using the shipping label I purchased from Goozex for $3.50 (the seller always pays the shipping), and once the recipient had received the game and found it working, they left me positive feedback, and 800 points were credited to my account. As a seller, I only paid for shipping in order to trade my game.

Once I had my points, I then decided that before trading any other titles, that I’d test the system just to be certain that it worked the way the site advertised. In order to buy games on Goozex, you first need to purchase trade tokens (your account comes with one token already). Each request costs you, the buyer, one token, which you purchase for one dollar. This means that for each game you purchse on Goozex, they make a total of one dollar. I found a couple games that I’d been meaning to test out, specifically F.E.A.R (350 points) and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 (450 points). I put the titles into my request queue, Goozex found a match within a day or so, and less than a week later, the games showed up in the mail. In the end, I spent two trade tokens, equal to $2.00, and $3.50 on shipping for a total of $5.50 to trade Silent Hill: Homecoming for F.E.A.R and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 Vegas 2. Comaring this to what I might be able to get at Gamestop, and I think I came out far ahead.

Check it out. If you’d like, signup using this link, and you’ll automatically be added to my friends list. You can also check out my Goozex profile here, just in case you’d like to know what I’ve recently traded or purchsed on Goozex, as well as what games I’m playing, and some other interesting tidbits.

Enjoy.

I tried to love it. I really did. I’ve always been an early adopter of new technology, and with that comes inherent risks I am fully aware of, and willingly submit myself to. I picked up, and paid $250.00 for Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit edition. I installed it and was very pleased with the driver support available for such a new system. It automatically saw my raid 5 I had setup, and installation was a breeze. I was also taken back by the good looks and functional alternative to the alt tab solution we’d been living with for so long. I was infatuated. I was blinded.

From there I decided to count my losses. Jumping through hoops to install even recent applications was fine by me. I had to learn sometime. After a while I had things the way I liked them. I had completely switched to Vista. Months went by and I was plagued by random video card crashes, sata hard drive disconnects, and eventually a complete loss of my raid 5 due to all drives falling out of the array at once. The technician and computer nerd in my head began working together. What could cause this? I was running 5 hard drives (one of which was 10,000 RPM), an 8800 GTX superclocked, dual core processor, x-fi sound card, and 2 optical drives. This was one power thirsty system, and considering I was running a lower end 680 W power supply, I figured that when my system was under a heavy load, my PSU couldn’t keep up, and from there random components would shut off and turn back on. This would explain the video card lockups and hard drive disconnects while gaming. So what did I do? I went with the best! I picked up a thermaltake 1200 watt power supply capable of a stable 100A output across 4 rails. This was Satan in PSU form. I installed and it (the power supply) worked great, but guess what didn’t change? Still frequent lockups and hard drive issues. That was $400.00 I probably didn’t need to spend.

From there it came to me. I had only began seeing these issues since Vista replaced XP on my machine. All my drivers were up to date, every update had been applied OS wise. There was no excuse for these problems. I finally bit the bullet, and installed XP again. It was immediately clear that my system was incredibly more responsive. Not only that, but my system halved itself on memory consumption within Windows. It was like I upgraded my system, when I had merely downgraded it. From here I installed my games again. Bioshock, the game that was locking up the most was of course the natural test. This game never ran so silky. I was running at 50 – 60 FPS constantly with no lockups, where with vista I could game for sometimes only 5 minutes at a time prior to a crash, at 35 – 40 FPS. That shouldn’t happen.

This entire time I was fooled into believing that hardware was to blame when it was just a poorly written and bloated OS. Lesson learned. Do not use Vista. At least not yet. Maybe when SP 1 comes out, some of these issues will be addressed, but for now, use XP. Everything is greener on this side.

First of all, let me apologize for my lack of posts in the past week. I’ve been ill, so the articles have taken a back seat to my recovery. Thankfully the flu has nearly completely subsided, and I am back to report on those things done while I’ve been absent. The past week has seen the release of one of the best gaming deals to date in the release of the Orange Box by Valve. This release includes Half Life 2, Half Life 2: Episode 1, Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal for the delightfully delicious price of $50.00. 5 games (three of which seeing their release for the first time) for $50.00. Fantastic.

Today I’d like to give my impressions on Portal. Bet you couldn’t tell from the post picture at the top eh? The idea of the game is to go through a series of levels. Point A to point B. You are given obstacles in the form of portal based puzzles. Your ‘weapon’ is a “Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device,” a tool for bridging 2 points. Using this tool, you can create an entrance portal (blue) and an exit portal (orange). Walking through the entrance will take you to the exit, and walking through the exit will take you through the entrance. What is particularly interesting about how the portals work is you, the player’s ability to look through a portal, and in real time, view the room from the other portal’s point of view. Imagine looking through a portal to see yourself looking at yourself through a portal to see yourself looking at yourself. It’s nuts. The puzzles range from the incredibly simple to the kinds of things where spectators might comment how they could never have figured it out. Going through the game, you’re going to feel accomplished. The game, although short, is sweet as the cake you are rewarded with at the end. Play it. Love it. Tell your friends. I cannot do this game justice with words. No matter how hard I try, nothing can describe the technological feat that is Portal.

Let us have a standing ovation for EA. Congratulations! You take the same formula, update a few levels, and release it again yearly and call it new. Profit is your name, and redundant games are your, well, game. The demo of Medal of Honor Airborne was released last week, and having seen some clips from E3 leading me to consider that this game might be viable, I partook of said demo. Regret and remorse filled my soul. Why were we hyping this game? Picture this for a moment. We take a game which we have all played time and time again, that game being the game that is World War II. Take a gimmick such as parachuting into the action, remove a sense of direction, leave some glaringly odd omissions, and you have Medal of Honor: Airborne. What could very well have been the most interesting additional to World War II based games has turned into bad mayonnaise. No one wants bad mayonnaise. What you will find in this title is the traditional Medal of Honor game play, but now your levels are more box shaped, and you can sort of choose your beginning point. That all sounds interesting on paper, but once you try it, you just see how much of a lack of direction this gives you the disservice of experiencing. Goals are wonderfully varied, bombing AA gun after AA gun, and the AI is terribly stupid. I guess back in World War II, enemies frequently broke enemy lines, ran through gun fire, and closed in on your position to melee you. That wouldn’t even be that bad if the melee atacks did a considerable amount of damage, but they don’t. They aren’t even worth using. So who cares? This game is about guns after all right? I guess, and strangely enough, you won’t find a reload button. I suppose we didn’t reload our weapons back in World War II until our clips were depleted. There goes tactical confrontations. All in all the game isn’t terrible, but it is just too EA for my tastes. Too few improvements over titles of yesteryear, coupled with very strange game play choices make for a forgettable experience. The mathematics of gaming success, right here, on The Sparking Wiggles.

Bioshock, the game I have been waiting for since I became aware of its development, was finally released three days ago, and what a three days those three days have been. So impressions? Fantastic. Above my expectations, dreams, and hopes. I am also proud to report that my computer is playing the game with all effects enabled, at blazing frame rates. No slow down here. As promised, I have taken pictures of the special edition box and big daddy figurine which can be seen directly after this post. There have been a few issues with the game from a community standpoint, the largest being the crash of the game key authentication servers. From what BioShock‘s Lead Designer Ken Levine says, the popularity of the title took the company off guard, and the authentication servers crashed due to the sheer number of people trying to concurrently authenticate their games. Bad news, but for a good cause. The game is getting the recognition it deserves.

Today 2K Games released the official Orchestral Score on their Cult Of Rapture page, so get over there, and indulge. I have already listened through, and enjoyed it very much. Composer Garry Schyman truly has a gift.

If you have not already purchased this game, hurry it up. Sell a kidney, and take the proceeds to fund the game addiction. It is more important to your life and well being than a kidney could ever be.