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If you are after things like "what Jeff thinks about games or music or movies or gas prices" or "points-related video," it will appear on this new personal site for now.

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As planned, I've been sticking to the drums, starting on easy, and working my way through. Don't forget to calibrate your set. While I play Guitar Hero with no offset on my LCD screen, Rock Band seems to think I'm about 30 milliseconds ahead or behind, I can't really tell which. Either way, after calibrating, my 90% finishes started going up to 96 or 98%.

It's tough to play drums because I'm used to using the drums to keep time. But now I'm keeping time, and that's weird. While I've thumped out beats on a drum machine before, sticks anda foot pedal are way, way different. I think I understand why so many drummers can't seem to get through a song without speeding up significantly over the course of a song. It's that feeling of knowing what you're supposed to hit next, but you have to restrain yourself and hit it at the right time. It's easy to get ahead of yourself, I guess. And everyone else in the band is playing to your time-keeping, so if you speed up, they speed up with you and the whole song sounds sloppy.

Rock Band doesn't do that, obviously, but it'd be pretty cool if it did. Maybe have the players speed up and slow down to your tempo, then judge how well you stayed in time, as well as how accurately you hit the right pads or something? That's probably asking a bit much, I guess.

After two hours of drumming, I now have twoblisters on my left pinky. Nintendo's always been super wary of anything that causes blisters (remember that Mario Party glove?), but Rock Band doesn't seem to care. Actually, maybe there's something deep in the manual about it, but there's no big goofy health screen or flyer in the box that says "WEAR GLOVES WHILE PLAYING, DON'T BE A FOOL." Maybe they realize that drumming in gloves is for punks.

A few more scattered things;

- The cover of Jukebox Hero is pretty good.

- The standard Xbox Live Marketplace menus are an awful way to buy downloadable tracks. They need to patch in some sort of in-game store, pronto. There are already too many things available to download for the stanard presentation to handle, and with more stuff coming every week, it's going to become impossible to deal with.

- My hardware works, though I can feel the bass pedal bend a bit when I hit it. As I get better at the game and start using the pedal more and more forcefully, I'm worried that it'll snap. But not so worried that I'll spend any time trying to strap any metal pieces to it or anything like that.

- While I like Guitar Hero III, I'm having a hard time seeing myself going back to it, partially because I like the Rock Band guitar so much. Maybe Activision will eventually cave in and patch in support for the Rock Band guitar.

- I need to start reading up on software that converts USB gamepad button presses into MIDI signals so I can wire up the drum kit to my PC and use it as a cheap set of V-Drums.

-I think I'm probably going to spend most of my Thanksgiving break behind a set of fake drums.

- Playing bass is also awesome.

- This game needs an online version of Band World Tour. I feel like I'm missing out on the game's most dynamic mode just because outside of the people I work with, none of my friends will ever be any good at any aspect of this game.

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Needless to say, I sort of feel like a sucker every time I look at my helmet now. Mine's still on a shelf in my bedroom, watching me sleep and silently cursing my name as I play other, non-Halo shooters.

So if you bought one, where's your helmet now? How do you feel about owning it these days?

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"Developed by acclaimed developer, Gearbox Software, Samba De Amigo will be exclusively available for the Wii in spring 2008."

This is not me doubting that Gearbox can make a good Samba de Amigo game. This is me thinking it's really out of left-field that the developer that brought you Brothers in Arms, the Halo port for PC, and the announcement that they may, someday, if they get around to it, make a Heat game is working on an update of a maracas-shaking rhythm game originally made by Sonic Team for the Dreamcast. Starring a monkey.

Totally natural fit for the Wii, so I'm pretty excited. Samba's one of the reasons why I still occasionally hook up my Dreamcast.

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This is quite possibly the most complete game design doc I have ever read:

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=25950789&page=0

It simply doesn't get any clearer than that first post there.

Please make this game. Thank you

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Actually, now that S&P is out, I'm hoping that we'll start seeing games that were never actually released at all. At the last SpaceWorld convention, Nintendo showed an underwater tank game for the N64 called Echo Delta. I didn't get to spend much time with it, but it certainly seemed rad. It was scheduled to be released and the game looked mostly complete... but it got canned. It'd be super rad if Nintendo dug up the game, did whatever it needed to be fully finished, and released it.

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I'll be on CNET's live internet show today at 1PM Pacific to discuss the Halo 3. Tune in!

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The drive's totally dead. Now it just whirs and makes a bit of a beeping noise and lists any disc I put in it as "unplayable." I went ahead and filed a regular support claim with Microsoft, mostly because I'm curious to see how long it takes to fix. Some people are reporting as much as a two-month turnaround on busted consoles these days, which is totally nuts.

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The only sounds (during Campaign playthroughs) were the occasional curse as a Jackal sniper ended a battle. Otherwise it was eerie silence. It's scary for us because we can't tell what they're thinking. The groups of journalists got on very well, in spite of working for rival publications -and played a ton of co-op, multiplayer and Forge. Campaign scoring seemed very popular and I can say that some of the press are total achievement whores. A small group came back after they were theoretically done, to go through co-op on Legendary because they were missing one scoring item they felt they could unlock.

Total achievement whores? I have no idea who he could be talking about.

Expect to see reviews landing on just about every review source you can think of on 9/23. And stop sending me Xbox Live messages about the game, I think the thing I had to sign means they can set everything I own on fire if I talk about it.

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You know, you'd think they'd get that sort of stuff squared away before putting the poster up.

Anyway, I gave up on it and pre-ordered from an online retailer, and, like a total sucker, I pre-ordered the Legendary edition. I'm surprised that places are still taking pre-orders for it, seeing as how it's supposed to actually be a somewhat-limited item. Maybe even the rabid Halo fanbase isn't falling for this. Seriously, after shipping, $160 for one game? One game that doesn't come with any peripherals or rock guitars or anything? I might just cancel it and go with the regular limited edition, I don't know. Even though it's not big enough to wear, I just don't really have room for a silly little helmet around here.

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I've done what any sensible person would do: I've dropped 30 more bucks on the US version of the game, and now I'm downloading that. Unfortunately, it won't let you have both versions installed at the same time. On the upside, that gives me hope that all the money I've earned and costume parts I've purchased will carry over to the US version. That'd be nice. Hwoarang without his silly-ass cowboy hat is hardly Hwoarang at all! At least I'll be able to actually read what all the costume parts are now...

And dude, is it just me, or did the PlayStation Store go from zero to 60 over the course of, like, three days? Between Warhawk, Tekken Online, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, the Sony download store looks...

A) Pretty radical.

B) Pretty different from Xbox Live Arcade.

Between Tekken being out in the US now (better connections with closer opponents) and Warhawk, I suspect my PS3 is going to be getting a lot more use from here on out. Though I still prefer the 360 version of Puzzle Fighter because, you know, points? Broke 45k last night, by the way. Streets of Rage 2 is easy.

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OK, now that that'sout of the way...

Full text and video reviewcoming on Monday. I will make no guarantees about the nature of that review because for some people (total jerks), saying "THIS GAME HAS WATER" could be considered a spoiler.

Blog entry on how anyone who has ever said "I AM STAYING OFF THE INTERNET TO AVOID SPOILERS FOR " is a bad person coming soon!

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[ Watch Video ]

The best part about owning a newer, faster PC: I can render these goofy videos in like four minutes, instead of the 45-60 minutes it took on my old machine.

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And by points I guess I really mean Garry's Mod, Picross DS, and Tekken Online, which are the three games totally dominating the rest of my spare gamin' time.

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Anyway, some people have been asking about a points report, and yeah, I'll probably get one going next week, but I probably won't talk about E3 very much at all. Between the podcast, On the Spot, our gut reactions piece, and our E3 awards, I think I've said everything that I'd have to say about E3, really.

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Q: When is the exact wrong time to crack open your copy of Puzzle Quest and get totally hooked on it?

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It seems like every time you talked to anyone involved with either series, and the question of online came up, they'd always sort of claim that it'd never work out well enough to meet their high standards or something. You'd see a lot of quotes like "we're focusing on the single-player experience" or something, which never makes much sense when you're talking about a fighting game.

So what happened? Well, online gaming sort of keeps blowing up, for one. For another, other fighting games, like DOA4 and the retro releases on the Xbox 360 and PS3, have gone online with varying levels of success. Have they been perfect? Heck no, but they've certainly been playable. At some point, I guess, the Tekken and VF developers must have realized that the bandwidth situation isn't going to suddenly skyrocket and allow them to offer zero-latency games, so they're making do with what we've got.

It's pretty exciting, but at the same time, it's all probably going to come down to how much lag you're willing to put up with. For the religious zealots of the Virtua Fighter world, any lag is probably too much lag. For the rest of us, though, it should work out just fine.

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Yet it seems like everyone involved just wants to make yet another dual joystick shooter.

With last week's release of Super Stardust HD, the PS3 crept up to three dual joystick shooters. Also, the Smash TV sequel, Total Carnage, is headed for PS3, so that will probably be the fourth. The 360 has Geometry Wars, Robotron, Smash TV, Crystal Quest, and Mutant Storm. Plus there's a Mutant Storm sequel in the works, and with PGR4 in the pipeline, hopefully Bizarre Creations will put out a true sequel to Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved at some point.

Wait, did I just say "hopefully?" I swear, it's like we're drowning in these shooters, yet I'm totally ready to play another one. I can't explain what it is about these games that I like so much, but all the way back to Robotron: 2084 and Cloak & Dagger, I've been a sucker for these sorts of games.

But here's what I'd really like to see, at this point. Midway needs to start creating sequels and updates to its old arcade games. And I don't mean stuff like L.A. Rush or yet another lame Rampage sequel. I mean go ahead and make games that are modest in scope and true to their arcade roots, and release them as brand-new downloadable games. Midway, at one point before the arcade business totally fell apart, had a design in the works for a Smash TV sequel. It was apparently meant to be a four-player table top configuration, with one player at each side of the machine, all looking down at the screen, sort of like Sega's Hot Rod or something. Certainly, someone over there has to have that document kicking around. So why not pick it up, dust it off, and finish it? Design it as it was originally meant to be, with the scope an arcade game is supposed to have. Then ship it out for $10-15 on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, complete with online play. Hey, it can't get any worse than putting out games of Hour of Victory, right? So why not go back to what works?

Other developers could certainly take this sort of approach, but the key is being smart about it. Look at what Namco did with Pac-Man Championship Edition. That's a very smart update to an old concept that manages to update the entire thing and makes it feel modern without losing the nostalgic look and feel of the original. They didn't take Pac-Man and make him some dark, brooding goth or something "edgy" like that. They clearly designed that game with care.

Atari's another company attempting to do full remakes of its old games on Xbox Live Arcade. Centipede/Millipede is already out, and Missile Command is out this week. The problem is that the developers of the new games totally rebuilt the games, and the end result looks like some gaudy Flash game that you'd expect to see churned out for free on any number of Newgrounds.com rip-offs or perhaps some freeware downloadable PC clone. None of the timing of the original is there. None of the graphics and sound seem to make it over. Outside of the basic concept and the fact that a (poorly) emulated version of the original game is part of the package, it has almost nothing to do with the classics. These games feel like they're being designed with absolutely no care for the original, and that's unfortunate.

How many more dual joystick shooters can the market possibly sustain? I'm going to take a guess and say that this style of game will be somewhat hot for at least the rest of this year. But in 2008, I can't imagine we'll still care about these shooters. But, then, I probably said the same thing after Total Carnage came to arcades, too. Ultimately, all I know is that I'd like to see more intelligent remakes and upgrades of yesterday's arcade classics. That'd sure beat some of the ugly stuff we're getting these days...

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