Peon's Place

Please, don’t try this at home. Or better yet – please do!

Champion Jockey: G1 Jockey and Gallop Racer, one of the new games line up that’s came from Tecmo Koei for Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, will have everyone laughing. At you.

We’ve used our new Kinect at home briefly, due to time constraints with our end-of-the-year schedule coming to a complete state of fullness, but we have had fun nonetheless; mostly at how wacky we look playing the games. This one is no different.

If you think this game is just a joke, think again, and watch the video!

So – pass or try?

While I am becoming grudgingly tired of Ezio as a character (I much preferred Altair in Assassins Creed 1), I did thoroughly enjoy the game inprovements made between AC 1 & 2. The last title, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, is nothing more than a mere extension of AC 2, with multiplayer added in. I am hoping the 4th title, Revelations, is nothing similar besides the character’s name. He is obviously older than he was, so I am very much hoping this latest release to be the last time he is utilized.

Here’s an excerpt from the UBI.com webpage:

When a man’s battles have been won and his enemies destroyed what then? Where does he find purpose and meaning? To find answers to these questions, Ezio Auditore will travel east in search of the lost library of the Assassins.

In Assassin’s Creed® Revelations, master assassin Ezio Auditore walks in the footsteps of the legendary mentor Altair, on a journey of discovery and revelation. It is a perilous path – one that will take Ezio to Constantinople, the heart of the Ottoman Empire, where a growing army of Templars threatens to destabilize the region.

In addition to Ezio’s award-winning story, a refined and expanded online multiplayer experience returns with more modes, more maps and more characters, allowing you to test your assassin skills against others from around the world.

View the E3 best trailer!

Click here for additional photos!

Read the rest of this entry » Assassin’s Creed &#...

I recall playing Duke Nukem 3D oh-so-many-years-ago. I’d dial-up and go at it with my best friend at the time, until wee hours of the morning. We had the cool game pad controllers, similar to those of a Sega Genesis, that plugged into the sound card. I typically won, he’d say that I cheated though.

After more than 15 years of waiting, Duke Nukem Forever has arrived in the U.S. ”June 14 in North America will forever be celebrated as the day that the legendary Duke Nukem Forever went from video game folklore to earth-shattering reality,” Christoph Hartmann, president of 2K Games, the title’s publisher, said in a statement. “For 15 years, fans have waited in limbo just yearning to hear those two little lovely words strung together–now available.”

Read the rest of this entry » It’s time to kick a...

Gamers can now rent video games locally at all hours of the day and night.

Redbox, the stand-alone kiosks at local retailers most known for their dollar-a-night movie rentals, now offer video games. Games cost $2 a day and can be reserved online for easy pickup at the nearest Redbox location.

Top new releases are available for rental, along with popular family and children’s games. A complete list of available titles is available online, available for PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360. Each of the company’s kiosks will carry anywhere from 22 to 28 different gaming titles, but there’s no indication as to how often the selection of games will shift around.

Redbox officials said the company began testing video game rentals at 5,000 locations across the country in August 2009. During that time, officials said, more than 1 million games were rented, proving that the customer demand was there as nearly 64 percent of Americans own at least one gaming console. ”With more than 21,000 Redbox locations slated to feature video game rentals alongside movies this June, Redbox will be the one-stop shop for entertainment,” company President Mitch Lowe said in a written statement.

Buying any game is a gamble. You can use reviews and recommendations to make more intelligent purchasing decisions, but ultimately, you might spend $60 and hate the game, or you might spend $60 and love the game so much that you basically complete it in a weekend. Either way, you are basically out the $60. However using the $2/day method and their limit of 25 days unreturned, you end up saving $10 on your games. After those 3-and-a-half weeks, you get to keep the rental game, after which time Redbox will dispatch the software disc’s accompanying box and instruction manual.

Now here’s one more reason that I’m not a big Call of Duty fan. fun to watch, not big into playing. Now they want a monthly fee? On top of $60 for the game? Hah!

Consumers are used to paying $60 each for videogames that run on consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Now the publisher behind the industry’s biggest videogame franchise, “Call of Duty”, is about to find out whether it can get them to pay a monthly bill, too.

Activision Blizzard Inc. plans to launch an online service called Call of Duty Elite this fall that will work with the next major edition of the game, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3,” and future installments of the hyper-realistic combat-simulation game. In a move industry executives describe as a first, Activision plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for the service, which will provide extra content that isn’t offered on game discs sold in stores, including downloadable map packs that give players new “Call of Duty” levels to play.

Read the rest of this entry » Call of Duty turns into P...

So the rigged votes are in, and a Cleveland Browns player is the new face of the Madden NFL videogame franchise. Peyton Manning? No, it’s Peyton Hillis. The 4th-best runningback of the 2010 NFL season. On a team that went with 5 wins and 11 losses last season, losing as many games at home as they had total wins all year long.

I’m not going to give any statistical information, about how Hillis went from 54 yards in 2009 (Denver Broncos) to 1177 yards in 2010, or how Jerome Harrison of the 2009 Cleveland Browns had the same 4.4 yard per rush average that Peyton had in 2010 of the same team. Or the fact that the Steelers in the same AFC-North division as the Browns made it to the Superbowl, and the Browns made it to 6th overall draft pick (which is happening today, by the way!).

I also will not mention how Peyton beat out both Aaron Rodgers, Superbowl 2010 MVP and Michael Vick, NFL’s MVP / Offensive Player of the Year / Pro Bowl starting quarterback.

Either way — congrats, Peyton Hillis. Now go break a leg. The Madden Curse dictates it to be so.

Apparently we’re having yet another new telephone area code in the San Francisco bay area. Go figure, all of the new cell phone plans outweigh the downward trend of home phone lines and complete lack of pager numbers. Represent the 669…! I can only see numerous sexual innuendos coming out of this.

The past four nights have combined a stunning total of around 14 hours of sleep, and my saving grace is this warm cup of cocoaespressocoffee that I make with our nifty machine upstairs. I’d blame Ron and the brunch that I went up to the city for on Saturday, which then led to breakfast on Sunday morning, but that’s honestly only a small section of the story at this part. On the flip-side, tonight is (tentatively) the first night I’ll be in my own bed since Thursday! You have no idea how I am looking forward to that.

Let’s see.. a couple weeks ago, when I had more free time (ahem), I passed through 10,000 gamer points on Xbox Live. It’s only fitting that the 80 point achievement for being crowned ruler of Albion in Fable III would be the achievement to push me past that milestone. I don’t think I’ve turned on my Xbox 360 since. I was going to purchase a Kinect, too.. but not if I don’t have time to play!

School’s going well. Stats is still a joke, and I have large projects in both my business and microeconomic theory classes, so that should be entertaining to compile together last-minute. Go me!

Lastly, are we tired of hearing about Charlie Sheen yet? Just when we get out and away from Lindsay Lohan, the media becomes fascinated with another drug/alcohol abused victim. I can’t wait to see who our new celebrity target will be once Charlie is completely washed up.

I woke up. I went for a swim. I came to work, and made some taquitos. My day has been hell ever since.

I make my round of call backs for customer issues that I have open, and after 2 phone calls, I actually end up with 3 more tickets than I had to begin with. Seriously? And it’s been like this for the past 2 weeks. I’m finally taking a breather from my day to complain to the world right now. TGITh?

So, I scored a 97% on my math test from last week. The one that took me 25 minutes to do and had people upset that I walked out of class so early. I missed a single point on a graph, while technically correct, apparently was not “pretty enough” for the professor. Sorry, I did not utilize colored pencils in my drawing. Sue me.

I finished off all single-player achievements in Assassins Creed: Brotherhood over this past weekend, and “accidentally” spent 8 hours playing Fable III, on the holiday Monday. The new game is pretty much like Fable II, with updated graphics and the ability to have random online players join your game, marry you, divorce you, and then give me 262,000 gold coins. Thanks for that by the way, my newbie character is now a landlord god, and I’m purchasing any and all buildings I come across.

As a finishing note, eBay’s trademark policies are killing me. That is all.

So here I am, sitting in my silly Statistics class, a mathematics course that is substantially lower than any other I have taken in the past fifteen to twenty years. A friend of mine states that this will become more difficult in the end, as I roll my eyes and hope that it does.

I waste two nights a week here, Mondays and Wednesdays, for an hour and a half a night. The term “waste” comes into play due to the fact that there are no classes which start at 7pm or later, so as opposed to taking a 3-hour class like the two I had last semester or the other two I have this semester, I utilize two nights for a class in which I will not learn anything for at least the first two months. Thank you, Business Administration pre-requisite!

We have tonight finally moved onto learning about the Mode Average of a set of numbers, which I learned about in 7th grade – when I was 12/13 years old. Modes are my favorite because they can be completely and wildly inaccurate as a measurement of an average set of numbers. If you’re still clueless, think “the number which most frequently appears” — congratulations, you have now learned the most difficult thing of the first two weeks of statistics.

I filed my taxes yesterday – after difficulties with H&R Block’s software that I’ve used for the third straight year, I should be receiving over $4200 back; whenever California and Obama get around to dropping that into my checking account. Thank goodness for claiming mortgage interest and property taxes.

My Packers won the Super Bowl this past weekend, which you knew already. And by “my”, I mean “the team I’ve been repping all year long, especially once we realized the 49ers were a wash”. My favorite football teams, in order, San Francisco 49ers, Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints. And if you must know two additional facts.. 1) I repped the Saints the entire season last year, and 2) I am now 4-0 in my last 4 Super Bowl picks (Giants/Steelers/Saints/Packers).

I’ve been playing the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood game I purchased post-Christmas pretty heavily for the past two weeks. It’s essentially Assassin’s Creed II (and a half), with multi-player that I have yet to get into. I even “forgot” to go to sleep twice last week, coincidentally Monday and Wednesday night, after this slow-paced statistics class.

I could give you some of the retarded things that go on in this classroom. Such as the guy divided 33/53 and came up with 25%, using a calculator. Or the the teacher explaining how to find the middle number of a short 5-number list, for ten minutes, and the guy next to me asking “Can you explain that again? I got lost.” I swear to god, I was going to stab somebody with my mechanical pencil. I do not see how many of these students passed high school mathematics, let alone achieved the pre-requisite of Introduction to Algebra for this class registration.

That’s it for now. Time to doodle and diddle some classic stick-figure artwork in my math notes. Ciao~

Microsoft has sold 10,000 Kinect units PER DAY in less than a month of this new gadget’s release. Can we call this “the thing” of Christmas this year? It has already outpaced Nintendo’s Wii in the first month of it’s debut. Microsoft is forecasting that it will sell 5 million units before the end of the holiday season.

“We are thrilled about customer response to Kinect, and are working hard with our retail and manufacturing partners to expedite production and shipments of Kinect to restock shelves as fast as possible to keep up with demand,” said Don Mattrick, president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, in a statement.

Microsoft is offering Kinect bundled with a 250GB Xbox 360 for $399 while the 4GB version is selling for $299. The Kinect sensor bar is also available as a standalone product for $149. But a check of Web sites for major retailers like Amazon and Best Buy showed that supplies are tight, with some bundles on back order.

Have you tried this thing out yet? I’m planning on my Christmas bonus money to purchasing a new Xbox 360 (250gb) bundle with the Kinect. =)