Friday, May 1, 2009

Music Game Clutter and Dino-Walking  

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It's late, I'm tired, and if you sent me e-mail and I haven't responded, just know that it's been a heck of a week.
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Games: Although I usually have nothing but good to say about Xbox Live, there's one thing that's really been irritating the hell out of me lately.
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Every Wednesday or so, I look forward to jumping online with each console and seeing what new DLC is available. I try my best to keep up with it, at the very least keeping tabs on things that look interesting if I don't have the time to play them that very second. The Wii’s setup works just fine, and although the PSN isn’t structured exactly how I'd like it, it's still not bad. Live used to be my hands-down favorite in terms of finding new DLC easily, but when it comes to the Add-Ons area, I'm sick and tired of new music-game DLC flooding the section and pushing other content out.
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In the New Xbox Experience, each section can only hold so many titles before the old ones get pushed off and you need to go digging in the ‘browse everything’ area in the hopes of finding out what's new. Ideally, you'd only need to go to the recently-released area to see the new arrivals, but there is SO MUCH music-game related stuff every week that it clutters up the menu and I'm often left wondering if I've missed something. However, with no clue what I may or may not have missed, I can’t exactly start scrolling through the entire alphabet of 360 titles hoping to randomly notice something that's new.
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I know that new Saints Row 2 add-on is here somewhere...
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Microsoft, do me a favor and condense all of the music-game stuff into individual icons. For example, if there are fourteen new Lips songs released, you don't need to give each song its own individual listing. Just put one general Lips icon in the new release list, and then expand it if someone actually clicks on it. It would save time, it would save space, and I don't know about other players, but I know I'd definitely appreciate actually seeing everything that's new when I go to the ‘what’s new’ area.
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Misc: Just saw Walking with Dinosaurs tonight at the Key Arena. It's sort of a long story as to how I got the chance to see the show, but I never turn down free tickets if I get the chance, and although it was certainly slanted towards younger viewers, it was still pretty interesting.
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I had never heard of it before last week, but evidently it's based on a BBC series. Basically, the gist of the show is that there’s a paleontologist who shares facts and information about dinosaurs with the audience while life-sized, very realistic (?) dinosaur mockups roam the floor mock-fighting each other and mugging for the audience.
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If you're sitting in seats that are significantly above the floor, the scale of the models gets lost. However, if you are closer to the actual stage, the size of these things is pretty amazing. Though the supporting mechanisms underneath the bodies of the dinosaurs are pretty hard to ignore, the work done in creating these beasts is pretty superb. The movement and skin elasticity is quite convincing, and if you squint just right it's not too hard to imagine one of these giant reptiles lumbering around as if it were real.
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this pic totally fails to convey the size of the beast in person
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I heard the ticket prices are a little insane, but if you’ve got a little one or you are a dinosaur fan yourself, it might be worth checking out. If nothing else, I guarantee that the dinos will look a lot more real than you'd imagine. Take a peek.
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