Digital Impulses

El Cubano Grande kicking ass in Call of Duty 4

My cousin Alex @ Cyber Lab in Torrance, CA.

XBox 360 Elite Review: What a Blast!

Dude.

So, after getting together the $$$ we needed to purchase the Xbox 360 Elite, we drove around to a few stores trying to locate the Elite.  We found the Halo 3 version at the EB Games in Hawthorne off of Rosecrans, but were advised by Byron that the Elite was a much better deal for the extra $50.

The Elite has the 120GB hard drive, the Wireless headset and the HDMI cable all included for just $50.00 more, very much worth the extra $$ in my opinion,

So, after a phone call from Byron, the GameStop near Artesia and Prairie set aside an Elite for us and we drove over there to pick it up.  After that, quick stops by Radio Shack to purchase a 100ft Cat5e cable to connect the Elite to our home network and a stop by the Best Buy in Hawthorne for an additional controller and we were good to go!

Installation
Once we got home, one of my son's friends came over and helped us get everything hooked up (including connecting the Elite to the HD connections on the back of my 6yr old 65" Mitsubishi).  Installation was a breeze and we were up and running within about 10 minutes of walking in the door with our booty.

Getting On-Line
Having run the 100ft Ethernet cable from my office to the living room, the Elite came on-line with nary an issue and nearly instantaneously. After that, it was a matter of answering some questions, providing a credit card and defining a GamerCard.

XBox Live Arcade
This was where the REAL fun began, as far as I was concerned.  After playing a few rounds of Baseball and Tennis, we set about exploring the XBLA to see what was available for us to DL and play.

Reliving the 80's
We DL'd Frogger, Tetris, PacMan, Paperboy, and Track and Field. Of course, the FREE DL's were just teaser, first levels if the games and if you wanted to play them for real, you needed to UNLOCK the full versions of the game. 

Microsoft 'Points'
What are 'Points", you say?  'Points' are the defacto currency established by Microsoft in the XBLA Marketplace which you purchase and then use as 'credits' to purchase stuff in said Marketplace.

Well, after much head scratching and a trip to my office to look on-line for a clue as to how to actually BUY THE POINTS, I came back to the living room to notice that there was a blue button at the bottom left of the screen that said 'Add Points'. 

I did just that and was presented with a screen where I could actually purchase points in different quantities for different amounts of $$.  I bought some points with my CC (already helpfully available from my earlier registration) and was good to go.

Having had so much fun playing the trial version of Track and Field, I decided to UNLOCK and DL the full version.  Doing that was dead simple and I spent the next hour or so just having a blast reliving the 80's (the copyright notice on Track and Field is 1983).

In a nutshell
So far, our experience on the XBOX has been utterly spectacular and our only regret is not having gotten one sooner.  Now, all we need to do is see if we can get Santa Claus to drop off a NEW, MODERN spiffy Plasma HD TV set for Christmas and we will be ALL SET.

The XBox 360 Elite is Highly Recommended.

WoW Marathon

Over the weekend of Friday, 10/13/06 to Sunday 10/15/06, I personally witnessed my nephew play 35 hours of World of WarCraft.  It breaks down as follows:

Friday 10/13/06:  Start: 3:30 P.M. - End: 11:30 P.M. - TOTAL: 8 Hours (played straight through)
Saturday 10/14/06:  Start: 11:30 A.M. - End: 3:30 A.M. - TOTAL: 16 hours (with a 20 minute break for a food run to Del Taco at 5:30 P.M.)
Sunday 10/15/06:  Start: 11:00 A.M. - End: 10:00 P.M. - TOTAL: 11 hours (with a 35 minute break for food and a quick self-service car wash @ 3:30 P.M. or so).

Of course, I wasn't there sitting next to him personally, but I am certain that he was in my office, at my PC, for those hours, playing WoW, non-stop.

He reports to me that he leveled from Level 55 to Level 57.5 (close to level 58) and had over 450 confirmed kills during that time span.

I have never witnnesed such intense game-playing ever before.  Wow.

Catching up with Mike

Most of this otherwise routine Sunday was taken up with a visit from an old childhood friend who came over to bring me a copy of an OS that I needed and just to spend some time visiting and catching up.

Being an avid gamer, Mike has decided to build himself a new PC, starting from the ground up with top of the line components and wanted some recommendations from me. With that in mind, we drove over to Comp-USA in Redondo Beach and Fry's Electronics in Manhattan Beach to see what was available in terms of Motherboards, CPU's, RAM and Video Cards.

The following is a list of what I thought would be a fast, no expense spared gaming rig (with the added advantage, of course, of being Windows Vista ready):

• Case:
  • Antec Mid Tower Case, such as a Sonata II or similar
• Power Supply:
  • Antec 500 Watt Power Supply
• Motherboard:
  • Intel 975 chipset-based Desktop Board "D975XBX"
• CPU:
  • Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2MB of on-board L2 Cache "E6400"
• RAM:
  • 2 to 4 GB of Kingston 667Mhz RAM
• Video Card:
  • ATI Crossfire compatible PCI-Express based card
• Sound Card
  • Creative SoundBlaster! Audigy-based sound card
• Hard Drives:
  • (2) 250GB SATA 7,200 or 10,000 RPM Hard Drives, Maxtor or Western Digital
• Optical Drives:
  • 1 DVD Burner and 1 CD Burner
• Standard floppy Drive
• Standard memory card 9-1 reader

Now that he has a an idea what to get, he will get the parts individually wherever he can locate the best price on-line.

As stated above, we did some preliminary inventory and price checking at Comp-USA and Fry's but most likely will find a better selection and price with an on-line retailer.