My Wife Hates My Xbox

Congratulations, Sid! Now How About Making a Game That Doesn't Make Me Late For Work?

You don't know me, Sid.  But I know you.

Civilization has been a stable of my gaming life since I bought Civ II on a whim back in 1996.  I was a huge history buff, and I just thought it looked kinda cool.

Little did I know that it would be the only legitimate rival to porn my PC would ever see.

I loaded Civ III on my company laptop when I was traveling all over the nation.  I'd curse when my plane was landing if I was in battle against the Japanese.   I'd frantically try to build city improvements while my battery light blinked.  I'd stay up until 5 AM, crouched over the screen in a lonely hotel room, managing my far flung empire and protecting it's borders from barbarians.

Then came Civ IV.  Would I win by being a cultural powerhouse?  By obliterating my competition while they were still in the stone age?  By landing on Alpha Centauri mere moments before the Aztecs did first? 

I fondly remember playing as the only civilization in the Western hemisphere, casually building railroads while my enemies beat each other up with catapults.  I cursed when the Zulus would unexpectedly build a city on the ONE SQUARE I forgot to explore in my back yard.  I never sucked at naval and air combat, but made up for it by letting my allies take the brunt of it.  And I knew that once I had built Leonardo's Workshop I was going to FUCK EVERYONE UP with my superior firepower.  At least until I invented the automobile....

This is all very esoteric, I know, but the Civilization fans of the world know what I'm talking about.  I lost more hours to that series than I did to dating in my 20s (yes, there's a direct correlation there) and I don't regret a single minute of it.

So congrats, Sid, for setting the Guinness World Record for Most Game Awards.  Now you can finally tell Will Wright to "suck it!"

 

Unlike Games It Has a Real Computer Keyboard!

Hulk Previews Gamespots Preview of Hulk

This is stolen verbatim from Brian Ekberg at GameSpot, who has immediately vaulted to second place (behind Zero Punctuation, of course) among my favorite reviewers.  I do love when a reviewer truly captures the essence of a game and its characters.

The Incredible Hulk Hands-On
We play Hulk. Hulk smash. Hulk fun.

By Brian Ekberg, GameSpot
Posted May 16, 2008 10:54 am PT

Hulk here. I coming out with game soon that come with movie. It blockbuster summer action movie starring puny Ed Norton and beautiful Liv Tyler. Hulk love Liv Tyler because she pretty. Hulk think Ed Norton overrated. Anyway, Hulk movie coming out in June and game too. You will play game or HULK WILL SMASH YOU! It make Hulk not happy when puny man not play Hulk game. You not like Hulk when he get angry. Anyway, Hulk getting off track. Let Hulk tell you about game!

Hulk wonder if shorts make Hulk look fat.

Hulk game in New York City. Big city! All buildings around, Hulk can smash. Hulk can destroy them all! Everything! Hulk took down one building with thunderclap when puny Army man shoot him with tank. Then Hulk pick up tank and throw it. Hulk like to pick up cars and trucks and vans. One time, Hulk pick up taco van and throw it. It funny, but it still make Hulk mad.

Hulk climb up buildings and jump big long way into air. Every time Hulk land, it cause cracks in ground! Hulk also pick up concrete and hurl it at things he see that make Hulk mad, like signs and cars and things that Hulk not smart enough to name, but have lights on them that go blinky blink. For some reason, Hulk game let Hulk take subway to get from one spot to next. Hulk surprised New York let Hulk use subway after he destroy half of city, but Hulk must admit, it convenient.

Everywhere there puny humans! They hassle Hulk. Some of them punies run from Hulk, but sometimes Hulk pick them up by head and carry them around. Hulk not really mad at regular puny humans, it only Army punies that Hulk get mad at. They chase with tank and trucks and laser guns that sting like bees. HULK HATE BEES!

Hulk have many things he do in game when he not smashing. All Hulk need to do is look at map and go to place with X on the map, and he can get new thing to do. One thing Hulk do is smash Enclave base, where puny humans with bee-sting lasers live. Enclave not want Hulk to destroy home so they send out puny tanks to stop him. Ha ha. Please not make Hulk laugh. Hulk destroy them into bits and then take down base with punches, kicks, and special powers like smash ground. It cause shockwave and blast away punies from Hulk. It good to be Hulk!

Then later, giant robot fight Hulk. It big, but Hulk not scared of robot. It have big eye in middle, and it try to stomp on Hulk like Hulk a bug. BUT HULK NOT BUG. Hulk catch robot foot and not let him stomp Hulk. Then he throw giant robot down and punch him. Hulk do this many times. He also throw taxi cabs at robot eye. That one nice thing about New York City; it easy to get taxi.

Hulk take in Broadway musical to calm nerves.

Someone tell Hulk that Rick Jones in this game, as well as pencil-neck Banner. But Hulk here to tell you that HULK ONLY ONE THAT MATTERS. Rick Jones nice boy, and Hulk protect him in game. And Hulk hear that archrival Abomination is in game. Ho ho. That rich. Hulk tell Abomination to "bring it" because Hulk will take him to Funky Town, where Hulk is mayor.

HULK TIRED OF TYPING ABOUT HULK GAME. Just go get game when game come out in June. Then you smash just like Hulk, even though Hulk bet you puny and smell like warm onions. Bye, from Hulk.

-GameSpot

Wii Bit of WTF?

I know a lot of people who have the Wii.  They all tell me how fun it is and it's a great party console to have and it's just...just...awesome!  Granted, they're icing their shoulders or elbows when they do so, but that's beside the point.  Reviews are always so enthusiastic the conformist in me considered getting one so the "whole family can play!"

Um...no.  Not anymore.  Wii Cooking?  What's next?  Wii Fitness?  Oh, wait.

I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass

Judge Smails: Ty, what did you shoot today?
Ty Webb: Oh, Judge, I don't keep score.
Judge Smails: Then how do you measure yourself with other golfers?
Ty Webb:  By height.

Curse you, Xbox, and you infernal achievements

Without them, I'd be playing at my own leisurely pace, bathing in the glorious interactive goodness of my games. 

Instead, my eyes twitch every time I get an e-mail from Mr. Big Dubya.  "Beat Bioshock last night," he'll say.  "Starting COD4 on Hard mode"

DAMMIT

I find myself cursing that there are new episodes of Lost and Battlestar Galactica because THAT'S TIME I COULD BE CATCHING UP.

I hold the overall achievement point lead, thanks to an eight-month head-start and a wicked addiction to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. 

But for how long....for how long...

Achievements:  The best idea Microsoft ever had.  Excluding that whole licensing DOS and Windows to PC makers thing, of course.

Note:  Don't even get me started on my little brother.  It's like my controller is a machete while he's wielding the BFG 9000.  The age gap can be a bitch.

Movies I want to see in the theater

...and by theater I mean on my couch in front 50" of plasma goodness because let's face it we're about to have another kid and getting out to a movie theater any time before 2015 is just going to be a near-impossibility unless one of you wants to volunteer to come to Connecticut and babysit. Yeah, didn't think so.

1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - I worry that I'm being set up for a fall here. Are they following the reverse of the Star Trek movie truism? Odd numbered movies = good; even numbered = suckage? I hope not. It's been 19 years since we last saw Indy on-screen, please don't pull a Phantom Menace on us.

2. The Dark Knight - Christian Bale back as Batman. Heath Ledger as The Joker. Honestly, do you need any other reasons?

3. Speed Racer - Oh, Lord, please do not fuck with my childhood. I am so wary of this, but so intrigued. I really want it to be good, but I also wanted The Matrix sequels to be good too.

4. Wall-E - It's Pixar. Have they ever done anything wrong? Other than make movies so addictive to children that your two-year-old will watch Toy Story until he's able to anticipate lines like you quote Princess Bride, of course.

5. Iron Man - Have I mentioned that I never read comic books as a kid? Will that cause me to banned from this site? Do I lose points on the geek scale? Anyway, this just looks cool to me and I love Robert Downey, Jr. even as the drug-addled, man-whore Julian in Less Than Zero.

6. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - What can I say? I've loved these movies. I'm not sure I can really point to why. They're just fun and they've really been the perfect vehicle for Brendan Fraser...well, after George of the Jungle, of course.

Sleeper: The Happening - I still believe M. Night has some good movies in him. I also like Mark (Don't Call Me Marky Mark) Wahlberg and, no, it's not some homie fanboydom just because he's from Boston - I think he's actually turned into a credible actor. He's also starring with Zooey Deschanel and that's just fine by me.

Tales of Asgard, Coming to a Theater Near You

Iron Man = big hit

The Incredible Hulk = coming soon (cue sad walking away music...)

Marvel Entertainment = Hollywood juggernaut

Officially Scheduled:  Thor, Captain America, Avengers

Color me psyched!  I'm still Marvel's bitch, even years after I bought my last comic book.  I've forgotten more X-Men mythology than most geeks have ever known, and got all giggly when minor characters would pop up during Marvel Ultimate Alliance.  I'm especially psyched for Thor.  I wonder if Vincent D'Onofrio would be interested in revising the role.

I should hold my tongue, though.  God knows there have been casting mistakes in the past.  As long as Ben Affleck and Nicholas Cage are still alive there's a very real chance these could suck.

One...two...three...Draw!

I'm not a fan of this series - it's just never appealed to me.  But this is just cracktastic.  From the Etch-A-Sketchist

My Wife Hates My Xbox Console Review

If you're like me, you didn't grow up with a Nintendo 64 or Sega Genesis perpetually wired into a little 32" TV in your family room.  Maybe your little brother did, or maybe a buddy in college had one, but there was no air of inevitability to owning a game system.  You hit your upper-20s or early-30s, got married, maybe squeezed out a kid or two, and confined your video-game playing to Doom or SimCity and fond memories of Donkey Kong and Mortal Kombat.

Now you're older, gainfully employed, juggling a ton of responsibilities, and thinking to yourself, "I've got this big, beautiful TV, a decent stereo, and a Grup personality, and allllll I hear about from the kids these days is how great video games are.  Maybe it's time the family and I plunked down some simoleons on a one of these newfangled gaming thingees.  But which one should I get?"

Well, your friends here at My Wife Hates My Xbox are here to help.  We're here to give you the quick low-down on the pros and cons of your options so you can make a wise, informed decision.  There are tons of gamer magazines, online reviews, and local tweens who can give you an opinion on which console to buy, but old farts like us need to be spoken to more slowly and in a language that isn't acronym-dependent.  I mean really, WTF?  ROFL!  Uh oh, POS...

So, by request, here's a quick guide to game-systems for all you normal folk out there:

Nintendo Wii

Since the Wii came out it seems like everyone has one or wants one.  It's cheaper than the PS3 or Xbox 360.  It has a family-friendly mystique.  The motion-sensor controls don't have the steep learning curve that will force you to memorize 'Square, Square, Triangle, X, Circle, Circle, X, Triangle' just to jump over a barrel.  This alone helps overcome thousands of intra-family arguments and will likely expose you to having your ass-kicked at tennis by a retarded five-year old.  But...

• For a basic party game, it's hard to beat.  Even your grandma will have fun if she doesn't throw out her shoulder.  But ask yourself how many parties you really have.  If you're one of those people with "friends" who actually come to "your house" for anything besides borrowing your grill, this could be a really fun system.  And let's be honest; you don't have any friends.  Even if you did, you'd have to buy all the extra controllers and about a thousand batteries to support the freeloaders.
• It's got built-in wireless access, channels that will look up the weather or news stories, and the ability to create a "Mii," which is basically an animated Playskool figure which can look like anything from Tom Cruise to Kim Jong-Il.  This is all great if you've never seen an internet browser, or your five, but otherwise...so what?
• It's also a safe investment if you've got younger kids (especially girls) and you like to lock them in a room to play by themselves while you polish off a bottle of wine and sob into a dish towel.  It's strength is also it's weakness; unless you're content always playing as a physically-stunted Italian plumber or an elf-like man-child with a gay hat--both of whom chase captured princesses that never ever put out--you're shit outta luck.  The promise of the controls is undermined by the lack of imagination in their uses, video-quality that is sooo 2001, and a game-selection that can best be described as "pathetic."

In short, it's a good choice if you're really not into video games, you're a cheap bastard, or you're morbidly obese and need something to make you drop the Butterfinger and get your giant ass off the couch.  It's basically a $250 board game.  Don't get me wrong...I do like it.  It's different and more social.  I'm just not that social.

Playstation 3

The predecessor to the Playstation 3, the PS2, was my first game system since I bought a used Atari 2600 at a garage sale in 1985.  Last I checked you could melt down all the PS2 game systems and games and create an asteroid the size of Wyoming.  But Sony sorta got lazy.  Unlike Nintendo, they didn't really target average human beings with their next-gen system.  Instead, they injected steroids into their PS2 line to create the Playstation 3, with all the bulked-up studliness and nasty side-effects.  What were the results?

• Visually, the Playstation 3 rocks.  If you made your last TV purchase based solely on the number of pixels on your screen and actually bothered to adjust it for optimal color output in your otherwise dingy basement then you'll probably want this.  And if you are that person then get a fucking life.  However, the games on this system look like candy,
• My two favorite game-franchises of all time, Ratchet & Clank and God of War, are exclusive to Playstation.  However, most everything else is available on both PS3 and Xbox 360, and many must-play games like Bioshock, Gears of War, Mass Effect, and a little thing you may have heard of called Halo are sticking their big middle-fingers in Sony's direction.  Wanna play those?  Suck it.  How does it feel to want?
• Up until January, when Warner Brothers stood up and farted in Toshiba's face , there was a replay of the old VHS/Beta war going on in HD world.  After the sudden, cataclysmic end to that conflict Sony's decision to pack a Blu-Ray player into the PS3 looks like a stroke of genius.  Gadget whores sitting on the sideline can order their copies of Planet Earth and 300 with a clear conscience, but what will they play them on?  What's the cheapest player out there?  Yep, it's the PS3.  Any DVD player that also supports Guitar Hero III can't be all bad...

Six months ago I scoffed at the PS3 as a bloated, over-priced also-ran with nothing but infinitessimally better graphics to vouch for it.  There's very little from a gaming perspective it offers that other platforms don't.  If you own or want a Blu-Ray player that works with an actual remote control then I'm not sure what you'd be getting except for membership in the smallest next-gen video game club.  But if you're looking for an excuse to buy a game system that your sceptical wife might go along with, you might want to point out how good Matthew McConaughy's abs look in hi-def.

Xbox 360

Microsoft just can't let other guys win.  If they smell success anywhere in the technology industry they back-up a dump-truck full of cash and try to bury and smother the competition with it.  Sometimes this works (See: Internet Explorer) and sometimes it doesn't (See: Zune).  Somewhere in between falls the Xbox and it's progeny, the Xbox 360.  As you can tell by the name of this blog it found it's way into our humble home, largely because it was out a full year before the other two and I have no patience.  Now that some of the shine has worn off does it still hold up?

• If you want to show your wife, girlfriend, or legal guardian the violent dark-side that you keep bottled up inside and is at risk at erupting at any moment into an orgy of blood and gore, then this is the system for you.  The game selection is robust, intelligent, and adult.  The video quality is more that sufficient to see the light reflect off piles of viscera, or the fireball shadows cast as you obliterate a small town with a gun that in no way compensates for your small penis.  Make no mistake...this is no place for a god damn plumber.
• Microsoft, in it's infinite wisdom, rushed to get the Xbox 360 to market a full year before the other two consoles.  Certainly a company can be forgiven if something they threw together the night before Christmas might have a few typos or spelling errors, right?  Doing a half-assed job is the American way!  Well, that doesn't fly so well when your console, which already hums along at decibel found primarily in sports arenas and on airport tarmacs, suddenly has a seizue that makes it's cyclopsian eye burn red and forces you to negotiate Microsofts byzantine customer-service network.  Admittedly this doesn't happen to everyone (it hasn't happened to me...yet) but I'd recommend keeping objects which could be thrown into TV screens out of reach in the event it does.
• By far the most robust online community for gaming can be found on Xbox Live.  Primarily populated by 12 year olds, troglodytes, and juvenile delinquents disguised as the new guy in accounting, it boasts downloadable content, forums for online death-matches, and an ingenious achievement-tracking system to track how you stack up against your friends.  This last part alone drives me to ignore my family and let dishes moulder in the sink in pursuit of catching up to Mr. Big Dubya in Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty 4.  Pretty sweet, except that unless you personally know the guys you're playing against you'll probably get utterly smoked by some smart-mouthed kid with a microphone strapped to his head.  And, unlike the PS3 or Wii, you have to pay to get access to Xbox Live.  Because god forbid you didn't pay enough for the console and games (or a wireless adapter!) in the first place.

The Xbox 360 is a well-established console with a game library tilted heavily towards Y-chromosomes.  Assuming you want to measure yourself against other players by some standard besides height, and that you don't mind owning a piece of technology that's just waiting to kick you in the stomach just as you're about to finish that final boss battle you spent the last twenty-six minutes fighting, it's a good choice.  It's also likely that if this sounds appealing you probably need psychiatric care, and your wife is probably secretly looking into calling the authorities on you anyway, so you may want to save your money for the treatment.

So back to the question at hand:  how do you decide between them?  Each has their own pros and cons, and it's plausible that your life-style doesn't lend itself to an easy categorization between pansy, dweeb, or psychopath. 

The solution to this, of course, is to get them all.  This is the path of the Chosen...the path I have taken.  As the Buddhists say, "Cast off pretense and self-deception and see yourself as you really are."  And we're all greedy little pigs who get off on shiny objects. 

P.S.  Attention Sony:  My path to enlightenment is currently endangered because I do not as yet own a Playstation 3.  You don't really want Microsoft and Nintendo to win in my house by default, right?  If you at all feel that this review in any way misrepresents your console, please feel free to send me one (free of charge) so I can truly understand and experience your product and correct any misperceptions I have.