Last weekend I got in some solid hours of gaming on my Blackbird PC.  I nearly finished up Titan Quest and ending up giving up after 3-hours of frustrating battle with the final boss.  I made a melee fighter and I couldn’t even hit the boss without getting hit first.  One hit from the boss resulted in death.  Since the game wasn’t that good in the first place, I decided that I had invested enough time it so I moved on.

I moved on to BioShock.  A game my husband played a few months ago on the 3-year old computer I built for him.   He had to turn the graphics settings on the game down very low to play, so he didn’t get to enjoy the game as it was envisioned.  The case wasn’t true on Blackbird.  I was impressed.  The first scene when entering the game involves the direct aftermath of a plane crash.  The main character is in the water surrounded by plane debris and flames and you must make him swim to safety.  It’s amazing because the cut scene goes smoothly from pre-rendered material to gameplay.  It really looks like a movie.  The game itself is beyond creepy, both visually and sound-wise.  I was playing with headphones on and the noise from various crazies swarming around my head over a background of very CREEPY 50’s-like songs and radio commercials really got me rattled (the sound in this game is phenomenal and could be considered a character in itself).  Basically, this game is like playing a horror movie.  I’m pretty timid, so I could only take small doses of this game at a time because I would jump out of my chair or scream whenever some baddy came jumping out of a corner and running toward me.  What I ended up doing was playing while doing laundry.  40-mins of game play while the washer and dryer are going and then a 30-min break to start a new laundry load and fold and iron.  My husband was in tears laughing watching me play this game.  I had nightmares last night — video cameras and TV static (combined with lingering damage from “Poltergeist”).  I don’t know if I can get through this game with my sanity intact.

Thanks to the employee stock purchase program and a hefty New Years special, I was able to give in to the flirt.  So far, I’m very pleased with my Blackbird gaming PC.

Here are the basic specs:

3.0-GHz dual core CPU
4 GB 800-MHz RAM
Dual 512MB video cards
160-GB 10000 RPM Hard Drive
900-Watt power supply
Windows Vista Ultimate

My Blackbird was supposed to ship on the 24th, but it shipped 3-weeks early, which cause me to go through some trouble because it was scheduled to be delivered to my home while I was away at CES.  Thanks to the kind folks in receiving in SD, I was safely able to take possession of my machine upon returning to SD.

The first thing I want to say about this computer is that it is huge and HEAVY!!!  At 80lbs, it was more than I could manage to even budge.  Fortunately, my husband is big burly guy so he unpacked it and put it into position for me in our upstairs office area.  The Blackbird comes with a keyboard and mouse.  My came with a Logitech pair; in fact the same pair that we saw at CES!  Happiness!  The computer also came with all the cables and connectors needed to do future upgrades, backup software, The Orange Box (Portal, Half Life 1 and 2, and Team Fortress), and a Tom Clancy game.  Plugging stuff in was a breeze, though, I did have to check the user’s manual to figure out which video card I needed to connect to my monitor.  And then I was ready to power it on …

I was pleasantly surprised by Windows Vista (I had brought up drinks and snacks in preparation for a long night of fighting with the OS).  It asked for a user name, password, and my time zone.  After that it connected to the Internet, downloaded updates, and brought me to a welcome screen.  I installed some codecs and then browsed my home network to find some anime to watch.  Yep! I didn’t have to configure anything to access my home network and within 15-mins of powering up, I was watching anime.  I was so pleased.  I watched a few minutes of a hi-def file our entertainment laptop was struggling with.  It ran smoothly on the Blackbird — SWEEEEET!!!  Next I installed The Orange Box which took quite a while.  Immediately, I experienced the woe that is known as “Steam.”  I won’t go into the details of “Steam”, but sufficed to say, I burned a little over an hour installing The Orange Box before I could start playing Portal.  BTW:  Portal ROCKS!!!

The next night I installed “Titan Quest”.  I purchased this game about a year ago, but my poor old computer could not handle it and refused to even attempt to load the game after I had installed it.  The game is a straight-up “Diablo” clone with updated graphics.  I liked “Diablo” so I’m having fun with this game and the Blackbird is allowing me to enjoy the in-game environments to their fullest.  Next up is “Call of Duty 4”, a game my husband has been dying to play.  I’ll let you know how it goes when we get it.

Anyhow, so far, after a little more than a week, I’m pleased as punch with my purchase and I highly recommend Blackbird 002 to all you PC gamers out there.

“What They Play” is a new website that helps inform parents about the specific content in video games that they may find objectionable.   Experienced gaming journalists were recruited to play and write up video games, listing what potentially objectionable content exists in a game.  The intent of this website is help parents understand, in detail, the ESRB rating a video game is given so that parents can make an informed decision about what games they will allow their children to play.  They strive to give unbiased facts about drug use, sexual content, foul language, and violent content, but do not include religious themes in their assessment (I probed on this deeply to the rep’s discomfort, explaining that some parents are sensitive to games that may have anti-religious themes, include the occult, and material that insinuates what they consider inappropriate romantic relationships.  Also, on the other hand, there are also some parents who are sensitive to pro-religious themes and/or content that they may view as discriminatory.  My feeling is that informed parents don’t become surprised parents that, out of shock, go on a crusade to ban what they consider objectionable entertainment for everyone else). Parents can also contribute by posting comments to each write-up.  The two representatives of this website said if this takes off, then they plan on expanding to “What They See” for movies and television and “What They Read” for books.  I asked if they considered manga within “What They Read.”  They said they did not.  I explained that maybe they should because the ratings on manga are just as confusing as those on video games.  Either way, I like what this company is doing and I hope they succeed because I want everybody to have an enjoyable gaming experience and I like the idea of giving parents the tools they need help their children select appropriate entertainment.

Put that joystick down and turn off the TV because the fun of Halo is coming to a backyard near you.  Now your little Master Chief can enjoy alien blasting fun outdoors, where he or she can breath fresh air and get some exercise.  Ooh!  I want Quake weapons — Gauntlet!!!

Two Barbie worlds were presented at CES this year:  the online world of Barbie Girls and the standalone software package Barbie iDesign. 

Let’s start with Barbie Girls.  Barbie Girls is an online community that allows girls to shop, play games, design fashion, and chat in a 3D world.  It is free for users to sign up and use the site, however, users that buy the Barbie Girls MP3 player/Doll can access more content than those that don’t have the device ($19.99 – $43.95 on sale on Amazon, regular price $39.99 – $99.99 for upto 1GB of memory).  Chat is limited to messages that can be selected from a drop down menu and there is no personal information about the other chatters available.  Freeform chat is only available to users who have the Barbie Girls MP3 player/Doll and the users must prove that they have an offline person-to-person relationship in order to be able to type their own messages to each other.  This is done by registering each other’s  MP3 player/Doll with each other’s computers — the players have to physically connected to a friend’s computer.  Here’s a picture of the online site and the Barbie Girls MP3 player/Doll:

Onto to Barbie iDesign:

A blog entry on The Gadgets Page has a far better explanation and appreciation for this software package and toy than I can provide.  Here’s the link.  In summary, this toy consists of some standalone software that is packaged with some cards displaying different items of clothing like skirts, shirts, pants, and shoes.  The cards have barcodes on the bottom, and using the provided barcode scanner, each of the items of clothing become accessible through the software to dress up a digital doll.  Extra cards packs are available for purchase to expand a user’s wardrobe.  After dressing the digital dolls, they can be displayed on the run way in a fashionshow.   There is the ability to print from this software :)!  Here’s a very low quality video of the demonstration the Mattel representive gave:

What’s interesting about these worlds is that Mattel has managed to figure how to get money out of this by realizing that kids don’t actually have credit cards, but rather the parents have money.  So instead of charging by credit card for a subscription or access to items within the digital worlds, money is linked to the purchase of hardware and items available at brick-and-mortar toy stores (and online at sites like Amazon).  Parents can purchase these items or children can purchase these items using cash from allowance or chores or however parent give their children money.

Note:
This one was tough for me to write up because there are some aspects of Barbie and the kind of play these worlds engage girls in reinforce thinking and patterns of interaction that I think are overall detrimental to society — and I’m not referring to the body image thing because that is something that can be easily discussed with children.  I’m speaking of something more insidious and not so easily explained.  I don’t like how the online world creates two levels of membership — one for users who “have” and one for users who “have not”.  This is the same thing I didn’t like about Stardolls.  It’s tough enough being a kid in real life dealing with socio/economic stratification, why reinforce the idea that priviledge is only for those who “have” in a play world.  I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who “had” (relative to most of my friends) as a child, and trust me, it cuts both ways and the result is bullying.  Most of time it’s not physical, but psychological, which really does scar some children for life.