Pure Digital Thought

So, you know I love playswitch.com because of all of the great games I’ve gotten. I recently took a look at their commercials which are also available on YouTube. This one is just hilarious.

Sarcasticgamer.com has posted a video spoofing the Battle Field: Bad Company game. Give these guys your support and listen to their podcast. It’s actually really good.

Sarcasticgamer.com’s Lono is staging a boycott of Battlefield: Bad Company. The game is another attempt by EA to suck more cash out of gamers who are already paying $59 for a game. DLC is supposed to be something that allows you to add more great content to the game to enhance the experience like small expansion packs or multiplayer map packs. However, EA has decided to package the Gold edition of the game with extra weapons. If you don’t want the Gold edition of the game, you can kindly fork over cash to buy those extra weapons. The weapons apparently don’t add anything. They aren’t more powerful. So what’s the point? The only point is to try to sucker some people into forking over more than $59 for a game. Even if the guns WERE more powerful, that would be even worse as it would be giving advantage to players who can fork over extra money to dominate others. I’m with Lono on this one. BS is right. Goodbye to your game EA. Maybe you’ll learn to stop this crap. I’m linking in the fun little banners that Lono has put up on the site for people to use on their sites. Join in and Viva La Resistance!

So I’ve been trading games on playswitch.com and I’ve been trading like a madman. Here’s a rundown of the games that I’ve gotten and the number of SBucks I got them for which is virtual dollars (1 SBuck == 1 USD). I’ve purchased some SBucks but most of them were earned by trading games from my rather large collection of 50+ games.

• Prey - even trade for LoTR: The Battle for Middle-earth II
• Viva Pinata: Party Animals - 5 Sbucks + Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars
• Kameo: Elements of Power - even trade for Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
• Fight Night Round 3 - even trade for Crackdown
• Meteos - even trade for Picross DS
• Just Cause - 20 Sbucks
• Halo 3 - 32 Sbucks (WHAT A STEAL!)
• Conan - 28 Sbucks
• Luminous Arc - even trade for Mario Kart DS
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas - 20 Sbucks
• And I still have some trades in the works!

I’m loving the service. I plan on replacing my entire game collection with games that I haven’t had a chance to play.

Okay, I never thought I’d say “Thank You” and “Microsoft” in the same sentence. But after today’s post on Major Nelson about the Gamerscore Corrections for Cheaters I just feel I have to say “Thank You”. It’s good to see MS kicking cheaters in the rear. It’s hard to believe that people actually pay others to raise their gamerscore and earn achievements for them. That’s really sad. But I’m glad Microsoft takes it seriously and has stuck to their promise to end cheating. I just love the fact that they’re publicly marking cheaters. That should make people think twice about it.

I was really surprised to see that both DreamWorks and Paramount have exclusively picked HD-DVD as the format for their movies. The reason cited is because of the cheaper players that are available. The XBox360 player can be purchased for $180 and standalone players are less than $299.

Personally, I think it is easier for a non-techie consumer to relate to what an HD DVD is. After all, we have HD TV and HD Radio and following the same naming is HD DVD. Although I know what Blu-Ray is and what the specs are I would bet many “average Joe” types may not. And then, if you factor in that the cheapest Blu-Ray standalone player is over $450 it’s really not hard for me to see why HD-DVD will win out. If you put Blu-Ray and HD-DVD side by side playing the same movie, I can guarantee you that most people won’t be able to tell you which is which. But if you put a little card on one side that says $248 and a card on the other side that says $450, 100% of the people will instantly tell you which hits them the hardest.

Now, if they would just *stop* making the stupid dual DVD/HD-DVD discs that no one wants, the HD-DVD discs could be cheaper since they would be HD-DVD only. That would help HD-DVD even more.

I kept running into a problem where I would try to restart apache and in error_log I would get a message stating:

[notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication …

Apache would just appear to hang for minutes. Stopping and restarting would result in the same thing. I looked around on google and others had similar issues. I finally found a site that has apparently gone away but I was able to get the text intact thanks to Google’s cache (Apparently it’s still there but has a funky connection). So, thanks to the guys at raptorized.com. Below is the text as found in Google’s cache to preserve this for future admins who hit this issue. Personally, I used the rng-tools package and that worked for me so I just stuck with that.

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