Gigabyte Drama

So, my Motherboard had a heart attack after a bad bios update. Gigabyte’s silly recovery measures don’t do jack. And now the board has to be RMA’d. I don’t know who thought that the boot block just had to be a writable piece in the bios, but that seems to be a dumb idea. Why not a recovery bios that you can manually invoke, something that can’t be overwritten, something that can be absolute in recovering the bios. Maybe that was what that automatic brick maker was trying to do, but it failed. This is the ONLY motherboard brand that I’ve ever had problems flashing and I’ve built quite a few systems so far. And then there is the DPC latency issue that came out of nowhere that made the PC completely intolerable. Too bad, flashing the bios made it worse.

Hurricane Drama

Around the beginning of September, Gustav came out of the blue to wreak havoc on the Gulf Of Mexico. It floored the Carribbean and set its eye directly on my home state. Me and my family went to Houston to get out of the way of the storm. Then a week later, Ike shows up and destroys the Carribbean once again and this time set its sights on Houston. Being a nearly 200 mile wide storm, the thing actually reached to my home town. We experienced the most Tornado Warnings for the entire year in a 24 hour period. After the 5th warning I was exausted but adrenaline kept me awake for nearly 48 hours. After everything was done, thousands of homes were damaged and flooded in Louisiana alone. We lost 2 trees in the process which have been there since before I was even born. That means a whole lot of cleanup.

DRM Drama

Spore, Stalker: Clear Sky, Crysis: Warhead and The Witcher: Enhanced Edition has all came out since I lost my motherboard to dumb design.  However EA has been in the hot seat with its Digital Rights Management software attached to Spore and Warhead. A lot of gamers learned this week that DRM hurts them legitimately when they legitimately buy the game which is heavily ironic. As a rule, I try to live with as little of DRM as possible. Meanwhile, illegal downloaders have had no problem stripping the popular SecuROM software. It makes you think, who is this really supposed to stop? A typical illegal downloader or grandma who just wants to install the game on her grandson’s computer?

Zune Drama

I don’t know if I can call it drama, other than my Zune headphones going dead after a year since I had the thing. Though I won’t blame it on the Zune hardware. Headphone design these days just plain sucks. I bought some Sennheiser headphones a couple of years ago and right when the warranty expired, they developed a short. Shortly after, the glossy cover around the cushion areas started crumbling. When will headphone design improve, or will they eventually force everyone into a premium $100 market to find the exact same quality?

Anyhoo, the awesome Zune 3.0 software was released on the 16th and with it a ton of new functionality. The software gained a slew of stuff, like Zune’s Genius function called Mixview, a Channels function which is pretty much automatic playlists, and a Social overhaul. On the firmware side, Games…finally, wireless marketplace because they really want you to spend those Microsoft points, a clock (yes, a clock), audiobook support and performance enhancements for both software and firmware. Though, I experienced my first hardware crash with Zune…ever. I just hope that its the firmware and nothing more serious. The last thing I need is something else breaking on me.

The Confirmation: http://www.bioniccommando.com/us/blog_entries/view/331

Speaking of the PS3, its announcements was as easliy boring save for a Little Big Planet, Powerpoint like display of Sony accomplishments. Resitance & improvements to the PS3′s online offerings has also has seemed to save the day.

Third Party Developers are the winners here in this aspect. Many popular 3rd party games were displayed and announced. PC gaming is also getting a lot of attention, where once developers on console would have never thought of porting a game to the PC is now porting them en masse. I guess you can thank Microsoft for that or the fact that the PC has always been a big platform with many potential customers. If you haven’t yet noticed this trend, then you need to look no further than world renowned Capcom Entertainment. Many of its top sellng titles are being ported to PC including Devil May Cry and Street Fighter IV which fully take advantage of the power available.

The most disappointing of the 3rd Party fun was Konami. The Rockband competitor called Rock Revolution looked lack luster and disappointing to those who have experienced both Guitar Hero and Rockband. Also, the showing of a Wii Castlevania fighting game that looks worse than Soul Calibur II on the Gamecube. A saving grace maybe was a showing of the DS title Order of Ecclesia.

Overall, E3 atleast to me is circling the drain before it falls through it.

On another note, I came across a free game called TrackMania Nations Forever. TrackMania is a very good looking racing game that throws Mario Kart like tracks in the mix. The physics of the cars allows you to run through loops, half pipes, super jumps and multiple air tricks. The game also has editors for custom cars and tracks. ITs counterpart TrackMania United Forever is a retail game that unlocks several features. This game could easily be free across the board if the advertising placements were more robust. For now there seems to be only two types of banners in the game, one for Toyota and another for one other company. The TrackMania Forever games also has an online mode which lets you race against people via lan or the Nadeo servers. (Nadeo is the name of the developer.) I like the game for the most part but most of the one lap tracks leaves you wanting more.