For this post, I'm just going to comment quickly about some recent news stories that I found on Joystiq and give some progress on my effort to earn an Xbox 360 through the Live Search Club program.

The $25 PS2 guitar pedal with seperate "Star Power" and "Whammy Bar" seems like an interesting product except for 1) I don't really need it since I currently do not have problems accessing either while playing Guitar Hero and 2) I don't have room for such a peripheral nor the space to house it.

There is apparently a Japanese DS "game" to be released in April (short title: Dressing Training for Adults) that teaches business-types how to dress properly and contains over 200 lectures. Like the previous item, interesting but not gonna buy it. I will however try to watch some "gameplay" when it comes out. Also: these types of DS software - the training products - should not be called "games" but rather "training apps" since that's really what those are.

Now for something that I can write a bit more about: the size limits on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) again causing trouble for an upcoming release. At first, there was a 50MB limit which was expanded in March 2007 to 150MB when Castevania: SOTN was released in digital form. Now the high-def remake of Street Fighter II is going over that limit with the graphics update and preserving the original music.

I understand that Microsoft has to impose limits to reduce their bandwidth costs and possibly also wants to let users, if they choose to, be able to load a couple arcade games onto their 512MB memory card and play them over at a friend's house. However, the latter is something that just doesn't happen anymore in the era of the suburbs and friends becoming made with further distances between them so the memory unit SHOULDN'T play into devising an appropriate size limitation. I read somewhere that the limit on PSN is 500MB and both the PS3 and Xbox 360 feature hard drives so it shouldn't matter how large a downloadable title is. If MS had to choose a specific number, 500 is a good round number and should not bring with it that much of an increase in traffic stress as the servers will likely experience when the GTA IV demo hits both systems' marketplace in a few months.

Talking about XBLA titles, Poker Smash is likely coming out next week on the service - it looks pretty and feature an interesting twist on Tetris-type, stacking puzzle games. This may be one of my first purchases on Xbox Live Marketplace when I get my 360, which I currently am about 20 solid days from earning through doing repetitive puzzles. I'll be able to order the console then (Pro bundle, I believe) and wait until April/May for it to actually get into stock and ship to my house. Perhaps I'll get before my birthday...

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to watch The Marriage of Maria Braun on Netflix and type up a paper that is due in seven hours...

P.S. GameTap + Wireless Xbox 360/PC Controller = super fun!

Buncha copies on the shelves of my local warehouse electronics store (aka Fry's) and since I didn't have a copy, I decided to grab one. Thankfully it was still priced at its original $19.99 instead of the 30 bucks Gamestop is asking for a used copy! I'll try to make a reaction video this week when I start playing now that I'm at Level 10 and can post user videos.

Gamastura has a story about a list of all-time bestselling Xbox 360 games in Japan and Blue Dragon tops the list with 203,740 copies sold since its debut in Japan last December, almost twice DOA 4's total of 108,618. That may seem small but if you consider that the total number of Xbox 360s sold in Japan is about 535,000 [figure from vgchartz.com], that means a little less than 40% of the console owners bought Hironobu Sakaguchi's game. I'm sure a lot of people bought 360s just to play it when it came out

The semi-surprise sales hit of a couple months ago, Ace Combat 6 is third on the list with 83,045 copies sold, just barely ahead of Bungie's Halo 3 (82,987). Idolm@ster, a game that deals with developing an pop idol character and will likely never come to the US, has sold a combined 63,559 copies including its Platinum Collection release and Assassin's Creed so far has sold 41,436.

Merriam-Webster named "w00t" Word of the Year for 2007, with "facebook" coming second. While this at first seems like a strange choice, I had heard some of my friends say "w00t" in real-life conversation and leave me feeling a little awkward. Now that I think about it, I don't particularly like the word and prefer to use more "traditional" celebratory words like "cool", "nice!", or "sweet" when in its place.

The Reuters article I linked to above also contained this attempt to be academic:

Online gamers often replace numbers and symbols with letters to form what Merriam-Webster calls an "esoteric computer hacker language" known as "l33t speak." This translates into "leet," which is short for "elite."