These are my Top 5 games on any platform this year. Being a transition year between console generations has been tougher than I expected on the release cycle. Early 2006 and summer 2006 were particularly sparse for releases, leading to a high number of titles launching in the Christmas season.
On a personal note 2006 was a year where I played very little between the months of January and May. Finishing up that degree seems so long ago but it involved going cold turkey for several months to get it done. With new releases on the level I mentioned this resulted in only needing to catch up on a small number of titles luckily enough.
This list is composed of games released in 2006 which I played, so anything which I didn’t spend time with is not included. I don’t see this as a problem as games which I don’t choose to play wouldn’t have made this by their very nature anyway. Argue all you like by the lack of Zelda Twilight Princess but it simply didn’t move the genre forward and ultimately was the reason for me not getting a Wii.
The two games perched far and away at the top of this list did move their respective genres forward. Both Gears of War and Oblivion are huge technical and creative achievements that have set the bar obscenely high for what games can do. If you play any two games this year it must be these.
“If Tito finds a way to beat Chuck, I’m going to have to come out of retirement and give Tito a whack.”
Asked if he was serious about lacing up the gloves again to fight Ortiz, Couture responded with an emphatic “absolutely.”
Potential matches if Tito wins - tons. Potential matches if Chuck wins - not many. Mmm I kind of see myself routing for Ortiz for the future of the business but also Chuck because he’s CHUCK LIDDELL. Fun fun fun on the 30th.
Someone finally posted the awesome video package FujiTV put together for the Fedor Emelianenko vs Mirko Filipovic (Cro-Cop) fight. I have been waiting to see this for a while as just about everyone who saw it last year raved about it.
It’s nice to finally see this but it also makes me sad to look back at Pride during its peak like this and compare to what we will have this New Year’s Eve.
Yes that’s another Google service I’ll be using on a regular basis. Add it to email, calendar, desktop search and blog ads and I should be worried. Am too committed to a single company? Maybe. Have they got so much of my personal information that they could build up a highly accurate profile of who I am? Definitely, but there’s no denying Google Reader is a great product.
Since the ability to sort the items by oldest first (chronological order = important) was added it became a viable alternative to NewsGator. Add to that the innovative use of keyboard shortcuts, Gmail integration and more Ajax magic and it really delivers.
One of key features any aggregator needs is to track what items you have seen and what items you haven’t. The great thing about ‘Reader’ is if you have seen an item it knows it has been read. No clicking ‘mark as read’ or worrying about moving away from the page as it’s all handled automatically.
One of the most impressive features is found in the Goodies section. A shortcut can be placed in your browser’s bookmarks which takes you to the next unread item on your list. Except it takes you to that item’s source page not to the Google reader page. This is amazing stuff quickly clicking through hundreds of different web pages while they are being marked off as read by the reader without your knowledge.
It’s still a little rough around the edges in some areas (interface) but I am happy to make the switch over with the recent downfall of NewsGator and the excellent new features provided here.
Overnight it would seem that the popular web based news aggregator NewsGator has added new features to it’s service that make it frustrating and unwieldy to use.
Many people such as myself consume a large proportion of our daily news through the service. There is a lot of junk out there whether it be redundant news items or just simply things that don’t interest me. NewsGator used to display the entire contents of a feed, allowing hundreds of articles and posts to be quickly scanned through and stopped at if they peaked my interest.
To hamper this, in a clear effort to save bandwidth, they have restricted the length of all items to 3 lines and added a icon next to each entry which allows it to be expanded to show the full content. Right now I have 412 unread items in NewsGator and I do not plan on clicking on that little icon 412 times.
The great thing about NewsGator was it treated feeds like a river and not the email style system so many of their competitors were using. This is a massive step back and judging by a quick Technorati search I am not the only one annoyed by this.
For a temporary solution to this I recommend logging into the UK version of NewsGator which is held back a few versions from the main site. But when the update hits there you can guarantee I will be switching to something else. Any recommendations?
Press release here. WFA wasn’t a threat, they were going out of business and it seems this was the best way to secure some of the contracts UFC had been seeking. Rampage is a cert and they want Lindland so he can’t be far behind. Herring and a few others are possibilities but right now only Jackson is confirmed.
This is great news for 2007, Tito and Chuck are going to have a few more guys looking for piece of the LHW title pie. More importantly we will have some FRESH MATCHES.
Now they just need to get Cro-Cop and this will be a dream week of UFC purchases.
Managed to get some time in with the new TV (JVC LT-32DX7BJ) over the weekend. It’s now plainly clear to me that if you don’t have an HDTV with Xbox Live Gold there is no point getting a 360. You’re only getting a fraction of the experience if you don’t - seriously. And for that reason you should get both rather than missing out.
I fired up a Gears multiplayer match to see how it was looking and I found it quite hard to concentrate on the match as I was noticing details I hadn’t seen before. Also having an overall larger, sharper view made the game easier to play after getting used to it. I can definitely see the guys with HDTVs having in edge online against those that don’t.
Being the only HD device I own I also tried out some movies via the 360. It upscales standard def stuff nicely but if you have a low quality source prepare for it to be exposed. DVDs are fine but if you backup to Xvid on a single CD prepare for a shock. Of course all this wasn’t playing natively but via TVersity which transcodes to a compatible format from your PC.
Aside from the general HD stuff the TV has excellent features in other areas. The VGA input is extremely handy and the best way to get the perfect resolution for the screen. It also allows you to tweak the position of the image on the screen if it’s off slightly, something many TVs leave out. Colour and brightness are good and there are so many levels and tweaks that can be done behind the scenes that it would be hard not to get the picture you seek.
As for normal TV (Sky, Freeview, etc) it seems to handle that as well as most other similar displays. Essentially stuff shot in HD or wide-screen with a decent bit rate even when broadcast in SD will look great. As for everything else (low bit rate channels, old movies) it will look shockingly bad. I don’t even want to think about VHS on this thing (or a Wii without component cables for that matter ;-)).
So a very solid display with some handy features. Highly recommended if you have a lot of different devices and sources that need hooking up, no matter what strange image is being sent it can usually be tweaked to look as nice as possible.
icon next to each entry which allows it to be expanded to show the full content. Right now I have 412 unread items in NewsGator and I do not plan on clicking on that little icon 412 times.
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