I told you Wii was awesome!  You should definitely pick up Mario Strikers: Charged because it rocks your weak world.

Although Meredith and I love the Wii, I'm really starting to crave non-cutesy, non-party games.  The Wii is really lacking on that point.

Meredith has been hinting at wanting Katamari and DDR, so I bought her an XBox 360 Elite for Christmas with both of those games.  Shh, don't tell her!

I might pick up Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed for it eventually.  I prefer to play my FPS games on the PC (and all other games, for that matter) but those two look pretty sweet.  Blue Dragon is also supposed to be an excellent game, and probably the only decent XBox RPG.

-b0b
(...wonders what other games he should get?)

I will be picking up Orange Box - for the PC.  Anybody that buys Half-Life 2 for the XBox 360 while owning a decent PC is a Stalin-worshiping pinko communist.

I already own the Valve überpack from the Steam/Half-Life 2 release (remember the cool hat?) with all of the Half-Life mods, Half-Life 2, all of the CounterStrike mods and CounterStrike: Source, and Day of Defeat: Source.  I want to get both Half-Life 2 expansions, Team Fortress 2, and Portal so I'll probably buy the Orange Box at an after-Christmas sale.

-b0b
(...w00t.)

......

And I'm spent!


X
(ahhhhh)

Whatever happened to the Quad SLI solution nVidia released with Dell back in the day?  For what its worth, this is probably a last minute gimmick to keep up with ATI's Crossfire solution, which is supposed to offer four-card coprocessing at some point (although it will probably suck as much as everything else ATI has produced over the past two years).

Did you read the system specs?  1100 watt power supply minimum.  That's sheer craziness!

I'm glad to see that the 3-way solution offers some actual improvement over a two-card rig, but its definitely limited to the higher resolutions.  Based on the performance of the older four-card SLI and 3/4-card Crossfire, I really wasn't hoping for much. 

That said, the games were only truly improved by three-way SLI when the resolution was cranked to ridiculous levels (2560x1600), and how many people do you know that own a 30" monitor?  By the time 30" LCD's even start to make it into high-end gaming circles, the 8800 Ultra will have long since been replaced by the GeForce 9000 (or even 10000) series.

Some of the benchmarks seem to point out that nVidia still needs to do some work on their drivers, which is to be expected.  In Quake Wars, for instance, two 8800GTX's outperformed three 8800Ultras.  If I had just dropped $2,000+ on three top-end video cards, I'd be pretty upset if some punk with two mid-range video cards had a higher frame rate than me.

-b0b
(...will laugh if one 9000-series card outperforms all three 8800Ultras.)

Actually, Stick, that's one of the big reason why I chose to get the XBox 360 for Meredith instead of a PS3.  I really want to stream content from my PC and server to our TV screen.  Meredith really wants to watch One Piece (an anime), but sitting around my green-tinted 19" monitor gets really old. 

Being able to stream video from Vista to the XBox will be excellent.  I just hope I don't have to re-encode everything to make it compatible.  Unfortunately, the new XVid and DivX implementations on the XBox 360 Dashboard don't support subtitles, so I won't be able to watch much of my anime...  Grr.

http://www.webtvwire.com/xbox-360-gets-divx-functionality-xbox-live-marketplace-...

For what its worth, nothing beats being able to watch Farting Preacher on the TV at a whim.

-b0b
(...score!)

Apparently, DivX and XVid only play through a separate dashboard option, not through the Windows Media Center extender.  Of course, I haven't played with it myself, so this is purely based on third-party reviews.  I'll be able to tell you more after Christmas.   

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/xbox-360-divx%5Cxvid-test/xbox-360-divxxvid-playback-...

-b0b
(...shrugs.)

Yeah, but who wants to buy an XBox and a mod chip and go through all of the trouble involved in soldering a billion tiny wires to the PCB?  If I was going to go through all that trouble, I'd just buy a laptop and a scan converter.

-b0b
(...already owns a scan converter, incidentally.)