Everyone and their mother reviewed this game, so it’s not my place to try to be some kind of authority, but when I think back to my time anticipating and playing Halo 3, I want to remember that the story never pulled me in, the graphics rarely wowed me, the gameplay felt stale, and the ending left A LOT to be desired.

I should also remember that the warthog run through exploding platforms near the end was pretty awesome, though…

(Thank goodness Bungie is somewhat free from Microsoft to try something new now.)

The Metal Gear Solid series may have lost my interest towards the beginning of the 3rd game, but it seems like MSG4 is shaping up to be an amazing game and arguably the first platform defining moment for the Playstation 3. The above, newly released demo footage of the game running live on Playstation hardware is simply amazing. Nothing on the Xbox 360 even comes close.

I need to remember to keep watching how MSG4’s progressing and maybe even get a PS3 when Snake hits the shelves for the last time.

Experiencing “the real internet” with the iPhone’s version of Safari is great and all, but sometimes you can’t help but wish that some sites were specifically customized to perfectly fit the iPhone’s screen. If you have a Wordpress blog, configuring it to look and feel at home on the iPhone is now a piece of cake with the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme. Simply install the plugin and theme to have your blog automatically detect when it’s being displayed on an iPhone then reconfigure itself to perfection.

I’ve already installed it and it seems to function as advertised. I should remember to keep an eye out for updates to see what they come up with next.

Update: Oops. Looks like this plugin is confusing Firefox for the iPhone browser. Odd. Guess I’ll deactivate it for now. Oh well…

Seeing trailers like the one above lured me into purchasing Tenchu Z… That and the idea of being a bad-ass-ninja™. Well, Tenchu Z certainly delivers on the promise of being bad ass, but also completely doesn’t.

First, how it delivers: it’s rare in video games to find something you find yourself doing often as satisfying as pulling off “stealth kills” are in this game. Damn near every time you do it, a smile creeps across your face. It’s hard to resist. It’s that cool.

Second how it doesn’t: there’s barely any story and unless you’re killing someone stealthily, you better just run away and try sneaking up again. I dunno, I would imagine a bad-ass-ninja™ would be as good in a straight up fight as he would be sneaking around. The makers of this game disagree.

At any rate, I should remember to finish Tenchu Z if not to see how the weak story ends, then at least to enjoy stealthily poking thugs from the shadows with my katana.

I had a lot of reasons for getting the new iPhone. The largest could have been that my iPod Nano had recently suffered an accident which left its screen destroyed or that I was still walking around with a 1st generation RAZR (which had cost me $500 at the time) whose battery barely held a charge. But the fact is, I wanted it. It just looked so great.

So, I restrained myself until the Monday after launch when I figured the lines would have died down. Then I went to the Soho Apple Store on my way in to work since I figured that the 5th avenue store was too close to all those morning shows. I walked right in, had 4 people in line before me, bought it, and walked out… Happy.

The best part is, though, that I’m still happy. I love this damn thing! Despite fears to the contrary, I can type quite quickly on the keyboard. The wifi is key, because AT&T’s Edge makes me feel like I’m on a 56k modem. The screen is gorgeous. And just top to bottom the device really delivers on all the hype.

OK, now to the single most annoying aspect of the new iPhone.

One of my many reasons for purchasing the thing was my dream of riding the train with big, cushy, over-ear, wireless, bluetooth headphones. My dreams of not snagging on other passengers was dashed when I learned that the iPhone didn’t support stereo bluetooth headphones. This really pissed me off. Oh well, at least I could still use my big old cans, right? Wrong. Apple did one of those things that just make you hate electronics companies (that’s you Sony!). They took a perfectly good standard connector and made it non-standard. They recessed the headphone jack effectively making the iPhone incompatible with every pair of headphones in the world. This is really unacceptable and I know they can’t fix it now, but they better help some third party vendors get some great headphones out there because I hate Apple headphones with a passion.

Of course, there are other things Apple should fix like custom ringtones, being able to edit what shows up on your home screen (I don’t need notes and stocks, damnit), having access to the landscape keyboard more often, IM, Flash support, games, and more… but I gotta remember that this is a 1st generation product that’s guaranteed to only get better! Get those software updates rolling, Apple!

This guy had the brilliant idea to tweak his photo’s color settings using Photoshop CS and above’s Match Color tool. Fantastic!

I gotta remember to use this sometime.

Back on February 28th, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Intel powered Mac mini at a small event. At the time, the announcement garnered both positive and negative reviews of the machine. Regardless of the reviews, this was the perfect machine I had been waiting for Apple to come out with.

Everywhere the old mini fell short (power, longevity, etc.) this new mini excelled. The one drawback was the integrated video chip which meant that it would never be a great gaming machine… but that wasn’t what I wanted it for.

I bought the thing that very day, and just a couple days later it arrived with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Once I got it home, it took all of a couple seconds to plug the thing into my Samsung LCD TV using a DVI to HDMI cable (not included, BTW) and there it was: OS X on my TV without having to juggle laptops.

Previously, I had been plugging my 15″ Aluminum Powerbook into the TV to watch movies and downloaded content. This was a terrible setup for a number of reasons. One, I had to plug it in each time and unplug when done. Also, I had to store all my media on the laptop which was quickly running out of space. On top of that, the Powerbook didn’t have an optical audio out port, which meant that the sound had to go through the headphone jack which picked up an awful lot of the Powerbook’s internal noise (harddrive spinning, etc). This made the audio quality pretty bad.

The Mac mini solved all those problems with the addition of a 500 Gig external harddrive while adding Apple’s decent Front Row application and remote. Placing DVD’s on the external harddrive even allowed instant access to my entire library from the remote just like iTunes had already done for my CD collection.

Yeah, some things didn’t perform flawlessly. Front Row, for instance, feels very young. There’s lots that it just doesn’t do well, although a fairly recent update shows that it’d being improved by Apple and could grow into a very nice piece of software.

In the end, though, I highly recommend this configuration and should you have cable TV (which I don’t) you can easily extend it using the great EyeTV products.