i am a pen!

If this is real news I'll eat a carrot.

Last night my headache had pretty much disappeared so I stayed awake to watch nintendo's press conference. It was worth it, but I was shocked at first when some woman came onto the stage instead of Reggie.

Thankfully after a snowboarding demonstration Iwata appeared, then Reggie. All was well.

Nintendo announced Animal Crossing for the Wii, which will include a bundled microphone. At last! Voice chat in Wii online games. Here's hoping it will work with Mario Kart. Probably not but I can dream, right?

They also mentioned a new GTA game coming to the DS, a new Wii Sports and Wii Music. Apart from those the conference was mostly about telling us how well they're doing. Wii Music looks good. It's aimed at letting you make music even if you don't know how to play instruments, and works quite well.

Sony's was as uninteresting as last year's. Jack Tretton seemed to be focusing a lot on PS2 sales. He showed off Resistance 2 - the sequel that nobody wanted as well as a downloadable Ratchet & Clank game. He also talked a bit about Gran Tursimo's TV feature - where you'll be able to watch races and things like that from the PS store.

Probably the most interesting thing in their conference was the announcement of MAG. MAG stands for Massive Action Game. Original title. It is special because it has 256 player battles. That isn't going to go badly. If every single copy of this game doesn't come with a headset then it will fail so hard. Even if it does, can you imagine the insanity of 200 14 year olds running around doing whatever the hell they want while the other 50-odd are sitting there trying to play the game properly. The game will be madness. Part of me is interested in trying it but I just know, judging by the actions of people in this kind of game, that it will be anarchy.

Actually, I lie. They showed more of LittleBigPlanet. Like last year, that was the most interesting thing coming to the PS3. It'll be out in October too, apparently.

Migraine headaches are no fun. They're made even less fun when you discover you can't drive to the doctor because when you last closed the door of your car it got caught in the seatbelt, causing the battery to run completely flat even though you have the overhead light turned off and the only that changes when the door is open is a small light on the dashboard. $80 and 3 hours for a medical certificate.

It's also E3 time. I had no idea the date was July 14th already. After a while I got way too uncomfortable in bed and stumbled out onto the couch. While I was there I turned on the TV and watched IGN's stream of the Microsoft press conference. The streaming actually worked quite well, for once. It was also a very nice resolution. Switching to National Geographic HD afterwards to catch the latest episode of "Street Monkeys", it looked almost the same quality.

Anyhow, the actual conference was rather average. Their main aim seemed to be "PARTYGAMES WOOOO!" and ripping off borrowing the whole idea of Miis. Later this year they're planning to change the entire XBOX 360 dashboard to some bastardised child of the PS3 XMB and an avatar based system. They also beat Sony to the punch in the US market by announcing a trivia game almost identical to Buzz! (which has only been launched in Europe) on the PS3.

They showed some Fallout 3 footage and it looks pretty good. Not sure why it's been refused classification in Australia though, as it seems like every other first person game. Cliff Bleessszzz CliffyB also showed some Gears of War 2 footage, and also showed that he's now 53 years old. Good stuff Clifford.

The new Banjo Kazooie game isn't looking too bad either. Not nearly as bad as the comments I've heard about it on podcasts. They're also going to be offering the original as a downloadable game. That's something I'm excited about.

The worst part of the conference was easily Lips. It's a Singstar clone styled game made by none other than iNiS (creators of Ouendan!). How iNiS have gone from making good games to Lips I'm not sure, but I'm willing to bet there was large sacks of money involved. They dragged some singing woman who I'd never heard of named Duffy out on stage to sing a song of hers that's in the game.

The song went on for 3 hours. During the time one of my cats looked very alarmed. I had to inform her that there wasn't actually a cat dying in the vicinity and all was okay. Duffy hit about half the notes on the screen and then forgot the words improvised. Overall it was bad. Not RIIIIIIIIDGE RACERRRRRRRRRR bad, but bad.

A little closer to Kaz Hirai territory was You're in the Movies. This game uses the Live vision camera to track your movements and insert them into Z-grade movies that you can direct, apparently. I was lying there picturing the pitch meeting...

Executive: "What the hell are we going to do with these useless cameras? Why the hell did we even make them? They don't even work. WAIT! Get me a developer!"
Developer: "You had something in mind?"
Executive: "MINIGAMES!!!!!!"
Developer: "Wait, this isn't the nintendo buil..."
Executive: "INNOVATIONPETERMOLYNUEX!!!!"

The demonstration was awful. The game looks awful. The vision camera sucks. You need full sunlight pouring into the room for it to detect your movements. Who opens up the curtains to play a game? You can't see the screen under all of the sunglare. Stupid.

Then they bought out some SquareEnix guy. After about 44 minutes of cutscene it was announced that Final Fantasy 13 would be on the 360. The word exclusive wasn't said though, so I'm guessing that there still won't be any consoles sold in Japan.

That was Microsoft, I guess. Nintendo's conference starts at midnight. I'm going to be awake for all of it. May Reggie lurk in my dreams.

I've decided this house should look at lot cleaner. Inside and out. I thought the starting point should be the garage, where all of the stuff from my childhood and teenage years is kept. Normally people would have thrown most of that kind of thing out years ago, but I am lazy. There are boxes upon boxes of stuff that I was too lazy to sort through when I put it in there. As a result there is very little room in the garage.

So I went and spent $100 on those big plastic crates with lids, and I've spent this afternoon sorting through all sorts of junk and transferring what I want to keep into these plastic sarcophagi. After around 5 hours I think I'm halfway there. At least that's how I'm going crate-wise. 2.5 out of 5 filled. Here are some pictures!

Since almost everyone is talking about how awesomely good GTA4 is at the moment, I thought I'd talk purely about it's bad points.

• "HEY CAHZEEEEEN! I see you're walking into a safehouse to save your game and turn it off! Let's go get drunk! We have to or you'll lose respect from me!"
• All the customisation you had in GTA:SA? Oh, yeah, we took most of that out.
• Street vendor hotdog = $5. Burger = $1?
• "Go kill this guy for me" "Oh hey, thanks for takin' care of that guy. Go kill this one now".
• The McRearys. Just when you think you'll get some original missions, one will call you.
• Only 20 minutes of Lazlow. In fact around 20 minutes of every radio station. Every time you get into a car it seems to be the same song playing. Why did the last 3 games have an hour-long loop and this one has less than half?
• The auto-aim system. This alone has caused me more deaths than anything else in the game. It can be handy to have when it works. It's an absolute nightmare in missions that are outdoors. If there's any civilian bystanders walking past and you hit the button to aim, it'll snap to them. Not the guy 3 feet away from you with a shotgun. If there isn't anything else around for it to aim at, it won't snap onto anyone.
• Oh, you have a million dollars? Too bad there's nothing for you to spend it on like houses.
• "Hey, I'm calling you to tell you I have killed the guy you wanted dead. Now I have to lose my wanted level but I can't run or get into a car because I'm on the phone to you. Oh, a policeman just shot me in the face and I failed the mission".
• Look at this store we have here. Doesn't it look great? It's all lit up and looks like the kind of store you'd be able to enter, but you can't. What's that? You entered the other diner that looked exactly like this one? Well too bad, because you can't get into this.
• When you turn your phone back on you usually get "Hey man why you ain't called me? I hate you 4eva" messages. Perhaps I haven't called you because I'm progressing through the storyline, or having fun.
  

Parts of these problems, such as the short amount of radio content, seem like they could be caused by the lack of disc space available on the 360 version (the only version I've played) but I haven't been able to find anything about the PS3 version having more content on it's shiny bluray.

Overall it's a good game, but it's severely lacking in comparison to the last couple. San Andreas had so much to do, and such a high level of customisation options. There's plenty to do in GTA4 but after a while it just feels like a chore. I have no idea why they've taken such a huge jump backwards in terms of game content, but it's fun. I guess.

I thought I'd try calling Microsoft's awesome billing department again. I mean, why the hell should I have to pay the balance of my account via credit card?

XBL gold is billed yearly, in advance. So I don't owe them anything for the last year of service.
Since my account was suspended when payment was rejected I haven't used XBL gold in this billing year, at all. I can't sign in, so how could I?

Therefore, I don't owe them anything, right? I asked the woman this and she seemed to ignore it. I then asked if I could just go back to being a silver member and upgrade to gold with my prepaid card. Apparently I can't.

Again, WTF?

I had an old credit card link to my XBL account. It had cancelled about 6 months ago. I totally forgot about this and when my XBL renewal came around I couldn't really do anything to change it. All I got was an email saying "Hey, we're already billing your card. This isn't a reminder that it's going to be billed soon, because that'd make sense". So I just sat back and waited a couple of weeks for the "Hey, jerk, your card doesn't work!" email.

This is where it gets annoying. Since my card was rejected, my account was suspended. I wasn't too bothered at the time because since I was going through training at my new job I'd usually come home too tired to play games. When I did feel like playing games, I had Brawl. So apart from watching HD-DVDs, I haven't used my 360 in over a month.

Now, though, I have new games for it. I got some rather good deals on second hand copies of Gears of war, Crackdown & Call of duty 4. I really want to play them, but I can't. Why? Well, my account is suspended! :(

Yesterday I bought a 12 month subscription card, since I don't have any credit cards at the moment. I tried entering the code on the website and got an error. Strange. I tried again to make sure I got the code right but got the same error. So I call them up and I need a credit card to pay my account. I explain to him that I don't have one, but that's too bad. I need a credit card.

So now I have to spend another $80. Why do they do things like this? They should put warnings on those cards informing people that they won't actually work if you used to have a credit card. I also asked the guy if he could delete the credit cards I have on file since they've all expired.

Nope. I have to pay them first. Then spend another 25 minutes on the phone. How does a company as enormous as Microsoft have such a terrbile billing system? We can't even do something as simple as delete expired credit card details via the website! It hurts that we pay for this, but the 360 is pretty much useless without live.

At least I have Brawl. Maybe I'll try playing Super Mario Galaxy again too.

As a company, I hate Apple. I can't stand watching their circle jerk conferences because Steve Jobs comes off as a smug arrogant bastard, and if that "Pirates of Silicon Valley" movie is to be believed, he is. These days the only things their computers have going for them is looks. The specs are nothing special. You could build a much more powerful PC yourself and stick OSX on it for a lower cost. Sadly not many people seem to notice this and people buy trash like the Macbook Air by the truckload.

Anyway, there's one thing Apple have always had over the competition - the iPod. No, not the touch. They're more fancy useless trash. 8gb for $50 less than a 160gb classic? What a joke. So, I bought a 160gb classic, since it will probably be the biggest iPod they make. Even if they do make something bigger, it's big enough for me.

I just wish it would work properly. For the last week every time I plug it in to my PC it freezes. iTunes picks it up and says it needs to be formatted for PC, so I click OK and iTunes freezes. Then I usually just unplug the iPod and reset it by doing the menu+select thing and it works when I plug it in again. Today though, it hasn't worked. iTunes won't start and my iPod won't reset. It seems I'm not the only one with the problem as well. How could Apple have got this so wrong? The 2 other iPods I've owned worked flawlessly.

Granted there was a lot less to go wrong in my 2nd gen - there wasn't many features to break. The 5th gen had a lot more features but it was rock solid. From what I can see the classic only adds a couple of features over the 5G but it feels like I'm using beta firmware. I wish I knew why it was so bad. Doesn't technology usually get better with progress? Now I have to leave my iPod sitting there doing nothing until the battery dies. I'm sure 2 days of the same text on the LCD will be GREAT for it.

So I finished Smash Bros Brawl the other night. The adventure mode, that is. It was a rather fun journey - much better than I had expected. I wish they make more games like this.

I installed movable type because I got sick of the way wordpress looked. It was also kind of broken from all of the messing about I did. I guess on the weekend I'll play with the design of it all, but for now I can't be bothered.