Reed Me : Halo

Wow. A first time for everything...

reedme — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:15:41 GMT

I've had the Halo 3-branded Zune since the first day of their public availability... It's been what, seven, eight months now? More? I still remember when the delivery guy dropped it off at the front door. Doesn't seem that long ago.

I thought I'd found (drum roll) a Microsoft product that never needed to be rebooted! Well, I found the next best thing. One (non-software upgrade) restart in well over half a year. Not bad. I have to reboot my phone all the time! I think I've had two, maybe three, software/firmware/whatever upgrade restarts of the Zune in that time.

To reboot your Zune:

It doesn't have to be a simultaneous press: you can first press the Back button then while holding that button, press and hold the control pad upward.
How to Reboot Your Zune (Zune Thoughts)

Ah, that's what I get for finally trying to delete the preloaded junk (besides the Halo soundtracks).

Still not sure I like the new Zune software. At least it's not brown! (Brown's not the new black, J. I'm sorry. Black is black. Brown is UPS. If I didn't have the Master Chief's Zune, I'd have a black one.)

The voice of the grunts writes novels, too?

reedme — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:30:44 GMT

Learn something new every day...

Contact Harvest is the most recent book in a series of adaptations of the video game Halo, for which Staten has been writing for years.
Best-Selling Book Shows 'Halo' Game's Wide Appeal (NPR Audio)

I didn't know that Staten was the voice of the grunts! Somehow knowing that (in some weird way) I'm shooting Staten in the head makes the Grunt Birthday Party skull that much cooler... piñata confetti and all. Hooray!!

Don't hate the game...

reedme — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:09:32 GMT

Don't hate the game, hate the...? I won't finish that famous line, because it would be bad advice to Hollywood. Heh.

"The audience on this game is the 18-to-34 demographic, similar to what you'd see in cinemas," quotes an Advertising Age article of Mike Hickey, an analyst at research firm Janco Partners. ”This could last for several weeks."
Cinema Analysts Blame Halo 3 For Low Ticket Sales (Gamasutra)

It's going to last longer than several weeks, folks. The current high school and college generations are buying high dollar entertainment gear and either pirating movies to get them earlier or waiting for them on HD-DVD... The "drafthouse theaters" were an OK idea, but the reality doesn't live up to the hype. Movie theaters are going to go the way of the video arcade soon if they don't come up with something people want to see that's worth putting up with hundreds of "strangers" (at best).

Hollywood needs to learn a little from Pixar and Disney. G-rated movies are the biggest money makers that Hollywood hates to make (for some inexplicable reason). And I'm not just saying that because I'm the parent of three small children... (But since I brought it up, I'll state for the record that I wish they'd stop pushing their socialist and environmentalist wacko agendas into the kids' programming!) One of my graduate courses in economics did a couple of class sessions analyzing Hollywood movie production from a strictly money-making perspective... the heavy focus on R and NC-17 movies produced by Hollywood makes no sense at all according to economics.

I think the upcoming stuff from the XNA group is evidence that Microsoft recognizes why the Wii has been whuppin' both the Xbox 360 and the PS3. (Hint: It's not just price point! I've talked to lots of people with younger kids who wish that I had some magic influence over the game mix that the 360 has for younglings. Parents do NOT want to buy one console for themselves AND yet another different console for their kidlets, but the game selection right now pretty much forces them to.)

I've had to field more than a few questions like "Is Gears of War OK for my 11-year old?" or "My 13-year old wants BioShock, should I buy it for him?" But those are the easy questions: The answer is no. Heh. Aegis Wing's OK for the pre-teens, but kids can only play so much Viva Piñata before they start to irritate the adults in the next room.

But I digress...