Yes and No

Here are six things the that were good in gaming recently and five that were not so good:

1. Halo 3's mulitplayer vastly improved over Halo 2's. No noob combo, sniping's not cheesy, the quick mute is amazing. Aside from those annoyance fixes, overall weapon balance is improved, and the new feature set (forge, theater) are amazing.

2. PSP redesign. Faster load times on a handheld are a great. The unit is also smaller and lighter. Now if they could just get the games to be better.

3. More original artist recordings in Guitar Hero 3. Cover bands suck.

4. The Xbox 360s with the 65nm chips released. Hopefully this is the end of the Red Ring of Death.

5. Super Smash Bros. Brawl moved to February. This may look bad at first, but now Super Mario Galaxy will get the attention it deserves. Being overshadowed is bad.

6. Bungie splits from Microsoft. They are now free to spread their goodness to PS3 and Wii owners (just not Halo goodness, MS still owns that). Those guys are too talented to just be MS's Halo factory. Before anyone cries doom though, Microsoft has agreed to not farm the Halo series out to anyone else. Bungie will continue to do those exclusively on Xbox systems. They can just do other stuff now too.

And now the not so awesome:

1. The Xbox 360 Arcade. All it is is a rebranded Core. No one bought them before, what makes Microsoft think people will now? Their insistance of having a hard driveless package is mind boggling.

2. The PS3 bait and switch. They release the 60 gig (599) and the 20 (499) gig. Discontinue the 20-->drop price of 60 to 499-->Introduce 80 gig-->discontinue 60, effectively making the only available version 599 again after making a big to do about a "price drop". That doesn't really seem like a price drop. Then to make matters worse, they are bringing out the 40 gig version in november for 399 and dropping the price of the 80 gig to 499. Yes, now we have a price drop, but we also have FOUR versions of the same system floating around out there to confuse people., Come to think of it, multiple console versions are just bad. Sony: 20 gig, 40 gig, 60 gig, 80 gig. Only half of these have backwards compatibility, one of them doesn't have built in wifi or memeory slots. Microsoft: Arcade, Pro, Halo Edition, Elite. With these you have to worry about hard drive inclusion, hard drive size, wired vs. wireless, HD cables or not, headset yes or no, hdmi or not, and color scheme. JUST MAKE ONE DAMN SYSTEM. While you guys were having trouble deciding what kind of system to release, your competion (Nintendo, remember them?) put out ONE machine, with almost NO amazing games, and ABSOLUTELY no bells and whistles, and they're killing you two. Nice job.

3. Wii shovelware. See previous blog


4.Manhunt 2 controversy. We want to shut Joe Lieberman, Hilary Clinton, and Leland Yee up, not give them more to talk about. Rockstar made another lackluster game that they have to use shock value to sell, and it bit them in the ass. Nice one guys, now we all have to pay for your lack of commitment to real quality.

5. EA bought Bioware. Now instead of Mass Effect being some awesome sci-fi epic RPG trilogy, we'll get yearly installments with minimal updates and additions, all brought to you courtesy of Axe Body Spray and Burger King. Plus, this kills any chance of Bioware doing another KOTOR (remember, they did the good one), since Lucasarts will probably not be cool with EA, a competitor publishing their game. Now that I think about it, EA also bought Pandemic, effectively killing Star Wars Battlefront as well. Thanks EA, for taking out BOTH good Star Wars franchises, and killing the soul of nerds with Darth Vader tattoos and replica lightsabers everywhere.

If anyone has anything to add, feel free to comment. And by anyone, I mean Adam. since he's the only one that reads this.