Archives for the Month of February 2007 on media addict
Academy Awards
I would tell you what I thought of all the movies nominated for Oscars, but I haven't seen them all yet.
The best part of the night was seeing Martin Scorsese finally win what should have been his third or fourth Oscar. It was also great to see The Departed win since it was the best movie I saw this year that was nominated. I was pleasantly surprised to see Pan's Labyrinth win several of the art and production Oscars. I was also very pleased that Eddie Murphy didn't win. If the academy didn't give Bill Murray and Oscar for Lost in Translation then Eddie shouldn't get one for doing a James Brown impersonation.
DirecTV sucks/Wii rules
Saturday was supposed to be a nice day with sunshine and relatively warm temperatures. I was also scheduled to have DirecTV attempt to install my TV service for the third time. Well third-times-a-charm it wasn't. After failing to install my new dish due to weather, then not properly rescheduling installation, and now not bringing the proper ladder to get the dish high enough because the job had been specified incorrectly. The supreme incompetence of DirecTV boggles the mind and it has cost them a customer as I will be canceling my service with them on Monday. All of the shows I really like can be downloaded or streamed off the internet. I have also come to the conclusion that watching sports is a complete waste of time. In the last six months or so I have also come to appreciate the podcasting/vidcasting phenomenon much more, consequently, no TV service will have little affect on me.
As I mentioned in my previous post my newly constructed HTPC will allow me to enjoy said downloaded content in a much more quality fashion. Speaking of which, Saturday night I watched some TV shows I had missed from the previous week using my HTPC and it kicks ass. Conclusion: F-your-face DirecTV (Rupert Murdock has enough money anyway).
Saturday wasn't a complete wash however; my Nintendo Wii arrived. Needless to say I have been overwhelmingly satisfied with it thus far. I was initially apprehensive about the lower graphical power and motion control scheme. These fears were unjustified. While graphics can make an already good game great, they cannot save a bad game. This is due to the simple fact that if a game is fun to play, that's all that matters (just look at Tetris). If future Wii games follow the guidelines (great gameplay combined with creative graphical art design) set by the two games I have so far (Wii Sports and Zelda: Twilight Princess), I can see the Wii competing greatly for my free time with my XBOX 360. Simple, fun, addictive gameplay is what the early game systems solely relied on. Games like Gears of War offer spectacular graphics and textures, but what keeps gamers coming back for more is that it is amazingly fun to play. It's for this same reasons that I played Wii tennis for over an hour today to refine my shots in this deceptively simple game. I can't wait till I get my component video cable to clean up the graphics a little on my HDTV.
First Entry, Wii, HTPC
I finally got around to starting this blog, so for better or worse here goes.
I am really excited today since I purchased a Nintendo Wii last night on Ebay and wasn't completed raped either. I got it in a bundle with the new Legend of Zelda game, which I was planning on buying anyway. I had been planning on waiting to buy a Wii until they were readily available in stores; but that looks more and more like it won't happen until April at the earliest. I also have an XBOX 360, which is a great system, but I have been looking forward to playing Zelda for over a year now. Now I just need to finish Gears of War.
I am also nearing completion of my home theater PC (HTPC). Now I will be able to watch downloaded content (like the various vidcasts and TV shows I regularly download) on my HDTV at native resolutions without dealing with all the S-Video scaling BS. This will be an especially big benefit for the shows I watch which are in HD, since now they won't be downscaled and then upscaled which greatly reduces the quality of the picture. This HPTC will also allow me to play music via a digital coaxial audio connection directly to my AV receiver instead of using a stereo out from my laptop and using Dolby Pro Logic to get surround sound.
I based my HTPC off of a Shuttle barebones kit from Newegg. I used a AMD Athlon 64 3200+ CPU that I already had, same goes for the 80 GB hard drive, 8x DVD burner and NVidia 7600GS fanless video card. I only used 512MB of RAM since Linux is not as memory hungry as Windows and I am not planning on doing much multitasking on this system. My plan is to use Ubuntu Linux on this system to have a very stable and secure setup without a lot of extra junk on it that comes with Windows. I have to see if the NVidia video card drivers for Linux offer the same overscan correction features that they do for Windows.
I think that's enough for today, more later.