Kevin Becker dot net

I finally got a chance to get a few rounds of Halo 3 in tonight. Was it everything I hoped? Yeah, definitely. There’s so much in it, it’s unbelievable. Bungie’s website for stats tracking goes beyond obsessive. Forge and Theater allow for players to train themselves to incredible levels. Mostly, I can’t wait to go at legendary with Dan. We’re idiots for doing legendary first, but we like it hard. And it will be… very very very hard.

Since I’m rambling, it’s obvious that I love the game even though I’ve played very little so far. But that’s not the main point of the post. As you can see by the title, I have way too many great games to play. But I can’t complain. It’s better than not enough great games to play. Currently, I’m still working on completing Guitar Hero 2 and Bioshock. Plus there’s a few arcade games I need to complete, like Band of Bugs, Catan, Carcassonne and Bomberman Live. Now I have Halo 3 as well. Then there’s Guitar Hero 3, Half Life: Orange Box and Puzzle Quest coming in October followed by Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect in November. Plus, IGN claims that Beautiful Katamari is coming in October and Army of Two in November, though those aren’t likely to make it out by then. Of those, I think I’m looking forward to Mass Effect most. And now I read some really good reviews of Eternal Sonata. I love those good ol’ traditional turn-based japanese-style RPGs and Eternal Sonata certainly looks like a good one. I haven’t had a good one since Xenosaga in 2003 (no, the Kingdom Hearts series doesn’t count, it’s neither a traditional RPG nor turn-based).

I love fall because it’s the best season for video games. Winter is pretty good too because that’s the time I catch up on my game playing.

Sour Apple? No, not a Blow Pops commercial from the 80’s, this is about Apple Computer Inc., er… Apple Inc.. Yeah it’s been a long time since I’ve posted something. I’ve considered posting here for a while and for some reason an article I saw on Boing Boing compelled me to do so.

The article is about Apple adding a cryptographic block to their new iPods to prevent them from syncing with anything but iTunes. While I understand that they probably want to make it harder for competing online music services to get their music onto the iPod. They’re trying to look out for the iPod/iTunes brand but they somehow completely missed the point. Part of the iPod’s continued success is that it is now so ubiquitous, everything is compatible with it. By doing this, they not only made it so fringe users like me are less likely to buy it because we run a flavor of Linux or BSD or Solaris or whatever and use programs like Amarok or GtkPod to transfer our songs, but it makes a large portion of people who use OS X and Windows less likely to buy it too. There are currently many many alternative solutions for syncing music on Windows like Anapod Explorer and Media Monkey. I’m confident that there’s numerous solutions on OS X too. iTunes really isn’t that good of a program. Those alternative solutions make an iPod a viable choice even for those people who don’t like iTunes, of which there are many. Once Apple makes it absolutely necessary that you use iTunes with their device, a lot of people won’t be happy.

Personally, I switched back to Creative players with my last mp3 player purchase this April and bought a Zen Vision: M 60GB, after owning an iPod Color that finally died after a good 2-3 years of heavy usage and even surviving my car accident. That said, an iPod was always a viable option that I considered. After seeing the new iPod Touch, I even had been thinking that my next mp3 player may be a 3rd generation iPod Touch 2-3 years from now, once the capacity of a flash memory based drive gets up to where hard drive based players are today (60GB+). If Apple continues to cripple their products like they are, an iPod won’t even be something I consider. Sure, there will be hacks to make it work, especially for Linux, but sometimes it’s not worth the hassle and I certainly wouldn’t want to support these types of practices by buying such a product.

With this issue and recently reading about the cable fiasco surrounding the new generation of iPods, maybe PC World is right in suggesting the Apple is becoming the new Microsoft.